FAITH ERIN HICKS ON ZOMBIES CALLING

[MattBrady]

by Chris Arrant

Zombies.

For some that's all it takes to pick one up. And you can't blame them, zombies have almost become a genre into themselves inside the horror realm. It all started with Night of the Living Dead, and has spread to a variety of movies, books and even comic series. The fandom around zombie movies have a strict, almost singular view, on what is and isn't a realistic zombie. Zombies are anything if predictable, so rules can be determined to live a long life even in a zombie invasion.

In the recent graphic novel Zombies Calling, cartoonist Faith Erin Hicks takes zombies on a humorous spin as a hard-core zombie fan named Joss gets her hearts desire and lands in the middle of a zombie outbreak. But she has two unknown college friends to watch out for too, and they're stuck on a college campus where some people looked like zombies even before the outbreak. But Joss has years of study into the zombie movies, and her passionate hobby has turned into a survival course as she takes those rules to heart to live until the next sunrise.

Zombies Calling marks the first print comic for a cartoonist who has been doing comics for over nine years. Faith Erin Hicks first came to prominence in 1999 with the online graphic novel Demonology 101 (commonly abbreviated as D101), and worked on that series through June 2004. Since then she's done a D101 spinoff, and a follow-up webcomic called Ice. But Zombies Calling is the first print comic for the avowed book lover in Hicks.

Zombies Calling is published by SLG Publishing and is available now.

Newsarama: Thanks for talking to us, Faith. Tell us about your own fascination with zombies. When did it start?

Faith Erin Hicks: Not too long ago actually. It started with the movie 28 Days Later, which is actually, as many will assure you, Not A Zombie Movie. But it's often identified as one, and because I enjoyed it so much I started checking out other zombie movies. I haven't seen that many, just the George Romero ones and a few of the remakes, but if you see more than one zombie movie, you start noticing the story patterns, which got me to thinking about the Rules of Zombie movies ...

NRAMA: Like the rules to horror movies, has parodied in Scream.

In your book Zombies Calling, zombie-fan Joss wanders into a real life zombie invasion – and after the truth sinks in, she tries to convince her friends while escaping the zombie hordes. Can you tell us what kind of person Joss is, before the zombies start calling?

FEH: Joss is a geek character, obsessive about her geeky hobbies and a bit social oblivious. She also has bad hair, no fashion sense and has yet to kiss a boy, despite being in university. I don't want to say that I set out to make a point with Joss's character (honestly, I didn't, I think she's fun), but I think she's a little bit more of a realistic interpretation of a female nerd. Sometimes I stumble across the odd comic where there's a "girl geek" character, but typically she's drawn like Pamela Anderson and just happens to like comics and Star Wars and has a mad fetish for the main male geek, who is often an author stand-in. I think I got the idea for Joss when I was watching the TV series Undeclared (one of Judd Apatow's early failed TV experiments), and the main character was this skinny, nerdy guy, and I kept wondering why I'd yet to see a female character like him.

NRAMA: Joss isn't alone in this. She's is joined by two friends, Robyn and Sonnet. Can you tell us about them?

FEH: Sonnet is the cool character, a gothy type skeptical of zombie invasions. She and Joss are good friends, although Sonnet sometimes seems a little condescending towards Joss's geek habits. Robyn is Joss and Sonnet's lone male roommate, and because he lives with two girls, he's a bit overwhelmed by hormones. With him I broke with tradition and based him on someone I knew, who I find pretty hilarious. I do not think, as Sonnet does, that Robyn is "stupid." He'll probably end up running the world someday.

NRAMA: As you mentioned, this is about the Rules of Zombie Movies. Joss lives by "the Rules", the truth about fighting zombies as learned from movies. How did the idea behind this come about for you?

FEH: I think it was the recent remake of Dawn of the Dead that inspired me to want to write a zombie movie (or comic) in which the characters were zombie aware. I remember being really frustrated by a scene in the movie where the main characters spent an agonisingly long time discussing the zombie plague and trying to suss out how it spread. I hadn't seen a real zombie movie until recently, but even before I had I still knew what a zombie was, and to avoid being bitten by one. I think I started screaming "the plague spreads through the BITE! THE BITE!!" at the TV.

NRAMA: [laughs]

FEH: And then everyone died because they were stupid and had never heard of zombies. It kind of sucked. So that's how I came to write about the Rules, in a roundabout way.

NRAMA: The best zombie movies have an air of social commentary – take Romero's original Dawn of the Dead with the critique of mall shopping – what would you say the social commentary of Zombies Calling is?

FEH: Student loans are screwed up, yo.

NRAMA: [laughs]

FEH: That's my basic rant throughout the book. I mean, when I graduated from post-secondary school and got my very first 'you owe us tens of thousands of dollars!' letter from my local student loan office, I've never felt more like a zombie. I'm not saying I have any solutions to the problem, and at least I had the option to go to post-secondary school, but there is something very screwed up about starting out your working career up to your eyeballs in debt.

NRAMA: Speaking of years gone by, the story of you getting Zombies Calling into print is an interesting one. Can you tell us about that?

FEH: I first started Zombies Calling as an online comic, but then, for reasons completely unknown to me, decided I wanted to pitch it to a publisher. SLG Publishing was the only publisher I thought would be remotely interested, so I whipped up an incredibly unprofessional pitch package and fired it off to them in the mail. I twiddled my thumbs for about a year, and had just given up on the pitch when they contacted me and said they were interested in publishing it. It's funny: I've always heard that you have to go to conventions and shill your work in order to get publishers interested, but nearly all my contacts have happened through the internet. Hurrah for the internets!

NRAMA: Hip-hip hurrah!

FEH: Anyway, I like to say that SLG only wanted to publish me because they liked my cover letter (it contained sentences! With periods!), but they've assured me that's not the case. Which is too bad, because I think my version is funnier.

NRAMA: You came to prominence by doing an online comic series called Demonology 101. And Zombies Calling started as a webcomic, like you said. What led you to wanting to do a print comic?

FEH: I'm a big book fanatic. I usually have about three or four books on the go at one time, and half a dozen graphic novels on top of that. I love books like nothing else in the world, and I really wanted to be a part of the whole 'I did a comic that I can hold in my hand' thing. I know a lot of people feel that we're moving towards a purely digital society, and that online comics are the wave of the future, and I'm sure someday we'll get there, but at this point I'm very much in love with literary things, and in long form storytelling, something that is very difficult to do on the internet. I still have people telling me that they enjoy Demonology 101 (or my other webcomic, Ice), but that they'd much prefer to read it in book format, due to the fact that it's a long form comic, not a bunch of comic strips.

NRAMA: Have you ever considered doing a print collection of the webcomic Demonology 101?

FEH: Honestly, Demonology 101 contains some very old, very shaky artwork, which is to be expected as doing it was basically how I learned to draw, and I don't think I would ever feel right asking people to pay for it. However, I kind of love Demonology 101. It was my very first comic, and I'm very fond of it. I'd like to return to it someday, fix up the story, redraw it and maybe get it published. But I'm leaving that for the future.

NRAMA: You mentioned your current webcomic, Ice. Tell us a bit about that.

FEH: Okay! Ice is very different from most happy fun things I've done. It's very dark, about a couple in England trying to survive in a broken down society where it is always winter. There's no explanation for the climate change, and the story is a micro-look at their life, and a conspiracy they get caught up in. It's sort of steampunky and noir-ish. It's kind of terrifying and challenging to do.

NRAMA: Comics is something you do in your spare time, when you're not working your day job at an animation studio in Canada. Can you tell us more about that, and what animation you've worked on?

FEH: I've done a bunch of stuff, most of which I can't talk about because they all seem to be startup projects that don't get picked up for broadcast (don't worry, I still get paid for working on them). Recently I did background painting on the new George of the Jungle cartoon that was broadcast on Cartoon Network. I had a lot of fun on that.

[DaVeO]

Among the glut of Zombie comics out there, this looks like a breath of fresh air. Who hasn't fantasied about being in a Zombie Apocalypse? Hell, I've had dreams about it.

[Ralph Mathieu]

Zombies Calling is GREAT! More please.

[AlexLothos]

Sounds fun!

[Cray_ws]

Originally Posted by DaVeO

Among the glut of Zombie comics out there, this looks like a breath of fresh air. Who hasn't fantasied about being in a Zombie Apocalypse? Hell, I've had dreams about it.

I am a very imaginative guy, and I don't think I've ever dreamed of being in a zombie apocalypse. I have a hard time fathoming the dead getting out the graves before they start walking. Its funny because I have had many dreams of aliens, superpowers, and magic, yet zombies seem far-fetched.

I guess something is wrong with me.

[delltechdude]

Ok I am definitely hooked on getting this! Loved D101 and this should be pretty awesome in its own right.

[librarykat]

Zombies Calling is such a fun book! I reviewed it for Voice of Youth Advocates, which is a professional journal for librarians who work with teens. And I'm with Faith about college student loans; my older son will paying his for at least another decade. For my husband, it was vicarage that has nearly done us in (it's like an internship for seminary students before they graduate and become ordained ministers). We'll probably be paying off debt for the rest of our lives, so everything Faith said about student loans in the book - yeah, I got it.

Faith, check with Jennifer de Guzman to read my review if you wish; I sent her a copy.

[Corpulent1]

Ha, I picked this up from Amazon a little while ago and loved it. I was surprised to see an article on it; I thought, like most of the graphic novels I read, it was old and I just missed the boat initially. Great stuff. I'll be keeping an eye on Hicks' future work.