“What do you think we do? We grab a couple of chainsaws and start hacking up walking stiffs.”
“Nice try freak, but you’re not eating my brain!”
“Well you look great! I mean, you’ve hardly decomposed at all!”
And so on. There’s some classic moments in this great offering from Slave Labor Graphics. Fat Chunk is an anthology series dedicated to giving talented artists the spotlight they deserve. Last year’s Volume 1 was all about robots, while this new follow up is all about zombies. Yep, zombies are more popular than the US President in comics these days and this digest is over 130 pages of black and white undead entertainment.
Most of the stories are 3 or 4 pages, while a few are silent and some have no clear end to the narrative. Like any anthology, not every page is a winner, but with Zombie they’re definitely…unique. There’s a glorious splatter of styles across these pages and I found myself laughing more than I expected. There’s a lot of profanity and raunchy material, and most of the humour is of the gallows brand, but it works. Splendid examples would be the black comedy seen in The New Kid by D Z Greene and Seph77’s Scabby the Cat. They’re funny because they’re wrong.
After reading this, I also realise how adaptable zombies are. In this collection, there’s zombies on blind dates, zombies as the focus of a charitable organisation, as hosts of cooking shows (guess what’s for dinner!), and as literal “working stiffs.”
There’s a wealth of talent out there, and every contributor mentions their website in their credits. The Fat Chunk website also has heaps of previews (some exclusive and updated) and links to more of the artists’ works. A lot of the work here is somewhat similar, with the exaggerated super-deformed style of street mags and hip hop tattoos, or manga-lite stuff of Saturday morning toons being the most represented styles. Some of my faves would have to be Jesus Briosso, Perca, Bill Neff and Aurelio. I hope Volume 3 is in the works.
Props to SLG for getting Fat Chunk out there, and for giving this skilled roster of storytellers a shot at grabbing new fans. If you believe you too are a worthy artist, they’re always on the lookout for fresh meat, er, talent, so give it a go.
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