So, when I was about fifteen years old, in the 1980s… I had this dream.
I wanted to make a comic book out of a film called ZOMBIE.
It became a life-quest that’s still with me to this day.
This requires some explanation. Hope you have a few minutes. Here goes.
My fascination with cheapjack horror films goes back to my childhood, and I brought a lot of it with me, into my adult life as a creative professional. Some people I know just don’t understand that. They don’t get how I can look at THE HOUSE BY THE CEMETERY and not see anything but the low budget, the terrible dubbing, the out-to-lunch screenplay… and I always tell them, it ain’t about any of those obvious things. It’s about the MAGIC. (They usually don’t get THAT, either.) In many other ways, I am a hardass critic of film and literature. I throw books by really famous writers across the room. I call bullshit on pompous stuff like The Hero’s Journey. I also don’t listen to super successful screenwriters with a lot of money in the bank when they tell me all art must be written to some kind of fixed pattern or you’re totally fucked. (That might explain why I am not as rich as they are, but I’d far rather be happy than “right.”) And by the way, I don’t believe or disbelieve any of these things because I am uncultured. It’s not because I think Frank Hennenlotter’s BRAIN DAMAGE is one of the greatest movies ever made. My love of trash cinema, in fact, may have led to a great deal of understanding about the world we live in and the realities we face as a human species. It’s kind of like the worldview you glean from comics made by Robert Crumb.
Yeah, even a movie like Lucio Fulci’s ZOMBIE has that for me. The movie possesses a kind of genius. But it’s not obvious genius. You have to really get in there and SNIFF for it. But when it hits you, and you really go there…. well, there you are. And it’s a lot of fun.
As I mentioned, I became fascinated with the idea of adapting this film (and many other films like it) into comic books, when I was still a teenager. I even started a version of ZOMBIE back in 1987, using pens and markers on plain white typing paper. I only got a few pages deep before other obsessions took over, seeming like much better bets. But, hey, how much of your life can you really waste when you’re seventeen?
FLASHFORWARD TO 1998. I had just finished my second full-length graphic novel project and my first officially published work. I was twenty-eight years old. It was a black and white comic adaptation of a marginally popular horror film, because of course it was. That was Lucio Fulci’s THE BEYOND. (The book has an interesting origin story, but we’ll save that for some other time.) To be mercifully charitable, the whole thing was filled with sophomore mistakes and it was all my fault. I was determined to repeat none of those mistakes for my next project, which was to be an adaptation of Fulci’s ZOMBIE. This was not my idea, amazingly enough. It was suggested to me by an artist I’d recently met through a friend at a convention named Michael Broom, who wanted to be the project’s artist, and I remembered my old childhood obsessions and realized… hey, this is fate calling. Let’s do this.
It was the good kind of fate, though. See, I did these things because I really wanted to, because they were vision quests or whatever, and so I took them very seriously. I wanted them to be right. (Even though I was not being paid.) I was not just the writer, but also the hands-on layout artist. I designed the pages exactly as I wanted to see them, Paul by panel, and sent those designs to Mike. He gleefully and expertly transformed them into incredible comic art. (Even though he was not being paid.) I took council with my masters as I created that one and learned from my mistakes. My biggest influence during that time was the great Steve Bissette, whose work on Alan Moore’s run of SWAMP THING I greatly admired, and who was kind enough to fill my ear with many words of instruction and wisdom. I was pretty good friends with Steve back then, having met him through Shawn Lewis, who was set to be the publisher of ZOMBIE. The words Steve filled my ear with were invaluable and the work I did on ZOMBIE was part of what transformed me from a somewhat talented rank amateur into a real professional creator of comic books.
Problem was, nobody wanted to publish the shit. So we just did it ourselves. In 1999, Shawn Lewis hired some biker guy with a printshop in his garage to crank out the first full-length graphic novel version of ZOMBIE. It was printed (badly) in black and white and only 700 copies went into the world, sold from a coupon in a flimsy xeroxed promotional mailer Shawn sent out through the postal service to people who bought horror merch and t-shirts from him. Seriously. That’s how low-budge the whole thing was. That’s how off-the-radar and not-on-the-internet we were.
You can’t get much more punk rock than that, kids.
And, no, we didn’t make a dime off any of those books. We don’t even see a penny when one of them miraculously shows up on eBay these days for five hundred bucks. (But no, seriously, buy a copy if you can find it. I DON’T EVEN HAVE ONE.) And so it all sort of came and went. We all moved on to other things that seemed like better bets. Various attempts were made to revive ZOMBIE: THE COMIC BOOK over the years, but nothing really ever materialized. We were too busy with our real careers. I started writing movies and publishing real books. Mike became a top creature designer in Hollywood. Shawn worked with Rob Zombie. We were fine.
Until it came time to start Eibon Press.
FLASHFORWARD TO 2016: That was when Shawn and I took a look at ZOMBIE and decided to resurrect it. But this time, we’d do it in color, as a four-issue series… and with a SEQUEL. After a nutty mutant-hyphenate career filled with many adventures in film and print, including big novels at major imprints, crazy passion projects and even a slasher movie made with two of my all-time horror heroes… well, at first I balked. Why would I want to go back to Fulci Comics? I had my own stories to tell. But then I took a look at those old pages… and… well…..
The Klown Prince started screaming that I HAD TO DO THIS.
That’s the name of my muse. The Klown Prince of Darkness. He’s gotten me in all sorts of trouble in my life and in my career. But he’s also never steered me wrong as an artist. He insisted I do BOTTOMFEEDER. He’s behind every short story I ever wrote. (And those are mean motherfuckers, kids.) He even said it was okay to write all those Lifetime movies… because why?
Because this is all ART, guys. If your soul is there, what the fuck does it matter? It seems to me (and to The Klown Prince) that no matter where you go… well, there you are. And so here I was, looking at ZOMBIE again and realizing I had to go back there… not just because it was “punk rock”… but because it was unfinished.
See I was still not a very good writer when I first made ZOMBIE. Because of Steve Bissette’s masterful teachings way back in 1999, I was able to design the layouts of each page like a pro, but the words were still not there. With the experience I’d gained in the years since, I was able to make it all work, for the very first time, with a sense of style that still had one foot in the gutter and the other in the grave. Director Don Coscarelli once told The Austin Chronicle that I had a “real macho writing style.” I guess that’s the trash art in me. The part that doesn’t take any of it too seriously. Because if you do take it too seriously… well, it all sounds like you’re writing a Metallica song. That’s what I left behind. That’s why my work works now.
It all started with ZOMBIE, which I consider my first real success as a writer, along with the short stories I wrote after the first version was published, which eventually became THE RIOT ACT in 2006. That was when I found my voice, for better or for worse. Anything else before that was pretty much schoolwork.
THE 2016 EIBON PRESS RELEASE OF ZOMBIE saw me back in the editor’s chair, but with a vastly superior arsenal of tools at my disposal. I had not only become a better writer, but also a graphic designer of some experience, having come through the gauntlet of SHOCK FESTIVAL. (That is a long story I will also not tell at this moment, but HERE are some pretty pictures.) Back in the 90s, I had used X-Acto knives and Liquid Paper on beer stained drawing easels to get all this done. Now every swinging dick had Photoshop and Illustrator and Indesign at his grubby little fingertips. On BOTTOMFEEDER and ZOMBIE, I taught myself how to do comics all over again, and the first tangible result was ZOMBIE #1, which we released in June of 2016, to sell-out success. (See cute little picture above.)
It had some problems, still, but I was okay with it, and it was well-received by most fans for exactly what it was: A robust and sincere adaptation of a film we all loved, done for all the right reasons. BECAUSE WE WANTED TO DO IT. That’s passion you can see on every page. And it’s still as punk rock as you can get. Because it’s all ours, and all rude as fuck.
We eventually ended up collecting all four issues of ZOMBIE as a hardcover graphic novel, too. It was the THIRD official publication of this thing. I loved that collection and it was super limited. Just 500 copies made. If you have one, never sell it. The darn thing is MAGIC, I tell you.
FLASHFORWARD TO 2022. We’d managed to publish not only the original story cycle of ZOMBIE as a four-part mini-series, AND not only as a hardcover collection… but also a batshit crazy sequel, which was four additional issues of mayhem and blood unlike anything I would have imagined myself writing in 1987. I was damn proud of all eight chapters of that thing, and FUCKING DAMN PROUD of everything else we managed to do at Eibon. The whole thing had been a head-banging two-man DIY operation and we’d made some great work. One of the things that made us truly unique from any other publisher was our packaging model. We put all our comics in these amazing jacket sleeves, that were just like record LPs. We packed the sleeves with extras, like trading cards and other collectibles. (Sometimes even CDs and vinyl soundtracks!) Shawn and I came up with that concept and I designed the sleeve personally, by cannibalizing a bunch of old record jackets I had lying around and creating our first prototype. That sleeve was on every comic anyone ever bought from us for six years, assembled, shrink-wrapped and stickered by Shawn himself. That is a LOT of work. But if it’s what you love… DO IT. RIGHT, PUNKS?
We never got around to a hardcover collection of these equal. In fact, that year, we almost called it quits. It was a strange, sad time. But I felt we’d had a good run. We did ZOMBIE, man. But a company called Vinegar Syndrome called us up and asked what it would take to keep things going, and so guess what? It was time to revisit ZOMBIE yet again for its really-and-definitive FINAL release.
But wait, didn’t we do this as a HARDCOVER collection already? How do you get more DEFINITIVE than that? Um. Well…
We decided to go back to the well and re-approach the story as a series again, but in single issues collected within a gorgeous collector’s hard case. It was kind of an insane idea. But why not? This was an insane project. And this would be it’s FOURTH INCARNATION in print.
In preparing the first four issues of ZOMBIE for this new version, the idea was to rebrand everything with all new design, all new logos, and even new covers. I’d never been totally happy with our ZOMBIE 1-4 covers in the early days of Eibon and felt we could do much better. So in that way, this project was STILL unfinished. I commissioned not just four new front covers, one for each book, but also four all-new original paintings for the redesigned Eibon sleeves that these books would be tucked into. AND I wanted all-new extras as well. Those were the cool trading cards, bookmarks, collector’s prints and even newsletters, which, believe it or not, we had included with every damn issue since the start of Eibon. We did all that over for the new releases. Plus I wanted a compete redesign of the book interior “indicia” and “back matter” and I wanted all new story content as well, which would move parallel to the main action of the sequential pages. This was something I’d also dreamed of doing since I was a kid, but somehow we never got around to doing it the first and second time we published it.
It finally manifested as THE JOURNAL OF BEVERLY BYRNE, a spooky short story in four parts, presented as a series of journal entries, which appeared at the end of each issue as official canon. I developed this with newcomer writer T.D. Fitzharris and we designed her story to flow visually as well as in the prose. I had done similar back chapters for the ZOMBIE sequel, and I wanted to do the same here. It’s an inspired bit of blood-soaked lunacy, which could possibly tie into a future sequel.
Obviously, this meant a LOT of extra work in presenting ZOMBIE again. It wasn’t just piping over the pages from the old editions. This was a whole new ballgame. It ended up like this:
The BOX SET concept for single issues was not new, but we did it in a way never seen before, with an outer shell that was actually a two part interlocking collector’s case, housing the Eibon-Sleeved issues within. That’s Mike Broom’s original zombie poster painting, done in 1998, with his signature right there, in his own blood, above old Wormeye’s shoulder. Yeah, you read that right. Mike signed his cover in fucking blood. Punk rock, anyone?
The sheer volume of extra materials created to accompany this new and definitive release were kind of mind-boggling, really. But this was the last time I was doing this shit, so it needed to be bigger than life.
And yeah that’s even SAGE STALLONE up there. I asked PAT CARBAJAL to immortalize him for a memorial tribute for issue #3. We all knew and loved Sage. He was an inspiration to us and to this comic series. His tribute was right alongside a Chas Balun memorial also. We are sad these guys left us. But we live on and dedicate our work to them.
If you wanna get technical, we did the box set collection, BUT also new individual issues you could buy separately… so really this was the fourth AND FIFTH versions of this project. It was the final form of ZOMBIE, almost twenty years since we first initiated it and forty years since I’d imagined doing it as a child. I mean, GOD DAMN and WHAT THE FUCK, right? The sleeve covers alone were Pat Carbajal’s best work and truly immortalized the project in a way I finally loved with no reservations.
Pat managed to top even himself with the sleeve cover for #4. It was a fitting end.
On a note that may also amuse you, each and every spec of lettering, graphic design and other technical work on all five incarnations of this thing were all done by me. I had no staff. I had no art director. It was just fucking me. I did that on all the Eibon books. And it would be easy for me to tell you something like, “I have no idea where I found the energy to do the work of an entire comics staff”… but that’s just how I am, people. I like a lot of control over how my art is presented. I don’t mind getting in there and doing it myself. (If time permits anyway.) And I trained my brain to do it because it was something that demanded my attention. I started doing this shit in 1999, cutting and pasting on an easel. It ended in 2023 with me screaming obscenities at my computer at 4am, much to the chagrin of my wife. And I designed every page of the story, very obsessively, quite meticulously, before Mike or even Pat went to work. I look at every layout, every logo, every cover design, and I see a lot of my soul and my heart poured in. I remember everything it took to get it there. Some of it was painful. But I always smile a little.
So what does it all mean?
Well, if we are lucky in this life we get maybe one shot at a crazy project like this. It comes and goes. You cash the check. It sells or it doesn’t. But if the thing you believed in was worthy… if there was real MAGIC there…. something you actually felt in your soul… well, you might just get a chance to really get it right. You might even get TWO chances. I got six chances on ZOMBIE. (If you count the sequel, which is a whole other story.) This is a project that has been with me for more than half my life, like an old friend. An old magic. Voodoo, man.
I think I’m damn lucky, actually.
Check it out ONE TIME, won’t you?