I love a good end-of-days story. But the doomsday genre, which was once packed with literature like The Stand and Lucifer’s Hammer, lay fallow for the better part of my life, tainted by the hyper-Christian, Rapture-inspired fiction like Left Behind and Kevin Costner-directed schlock like The Postman.
Luckily, the apocalypse was saved. All things Armageddon burst back into popular culture in the last decade, most notably in the form of a re-ignited interest in the zombie genre. What prompted this post-apocalyptic trend?
It’s wasn’t the novel; that well was practically emptied in the mid-1990s by Blindness and Children of Men. It’s certainly not the short story or the poem either, although I’d love to see someone try an epically apocalyptic modern poem. It was comic books.
Y: The Last Man, an epic about the last man to survive a gender-specific plague, debuted in 2002, and the first-runs of of The Walking Dead and DMZ soon followed. The three comics are all completely different from one another, but they share a common subject: The human race, post-apocalypse.
“How would a someone survive if the world collapsed?” they asked. “What would the world even look like?”
By tackling these questions, writers Brian K. Vaughn, Robert Kirkman, and Brian Wood injected gritty realism into a genre that had succumbed to campiness. They eschewed traditional plot devices to illustrate that in a post-apocalyptic world, there is no happy ending. There is no ending at all.
“At that time, it was unheard of to just do a zombie book that had nothing special whatsoever. No sci-fi elements, no heavy action stuff, no twists, no superpowers,” Kirkman, author of The Walking Dead, said in a 2007 interview with IGN. “And that’s kind of why I wanted to do it.”
The lax editorial oversight that is typical of comic books allowed the Vaughn, Kirkman, and Wood to plumb the depths of the genre. They had no guarantee that they could finish their stories—comics’ notoriously low start-up costs provide publishers with an incentive to take risks—but they nonetheless laid narrative foundations for the long-term development of revolutionary plots.
The true strength of the comics laid in the industry itself. Adult-themed comics are only successful if the writer pushes the boundaries of his genre. It happened in the 1980s when Frank Miller and Alan Moore turned America’s superheroes into tortured souls. It happened again in the 1990s when Ghost World redefined the high school narrative.
These comics had a profound impact on their respective archetypes. Each comic reshaped the tone and style of the genre they explored, injecting fresh concepts into a traditional—and in the case of The Walking Dead, often ridiculed—storyline. Writers like Vaughn, Kirkman, and Wood set their sights on life after an apocalypse last decade. Not so coincidentally, their successes lead to a surge in the genre’s representation in film, television, and of course, more comics, almost immediately after their respective publications hit stores. As pop culture tastemakers, many of the comics saw second (or third) lives in adaptations, which also drew success and acclaim.
Comic books harness the imagination unlike any other form of literature. By merging text and images, readers enjoy the immediate satisfaction of a scene without the absolute detail of film or television. And the result is books like Y or The Walking Dead or DMZ, which carry enough pop culture value to ignite mainstream trends. There’s more going on than a simple production advantage.
So those of you interested in pop culture prognostication, take heed. It’s going to be comic books, not crystal balls, that determine the shape of things to come.
Do you wish Chris were the last man on Earth? Let him know at cheller@georgetownvoice.com
