As odd as this may sound, there are two things that I hold dear to me: Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol, and zombie flicks. In fact for the past few years (mostly) I've ended each year by illustrating a crosshatched style pen and ink illustration depicting scenes from the Christmas classic. It started with Jacob Marley and each year afterward I drew a scene featuring each ghost. Now I pick a new scene from the book to illustrate and start working around Thanksgiving and usually can have the entire illustration done by Christmas. If you've known me for a while, this is tradition.
I'm also a huge fan of the zombie genre. Though I'm not much on horror movies in general but if it's got zombies, I'm in. So, you would think that when Marvel Comics came out with their zombie adaptation of A Christmas Carol, I'd be on board.
First published in 2011, I found it at a clearance sale. It's a hardcover volume collecting each issue (it was published as a miniseries). I couldn't wait to read it, but after about half way through it was obvious-much like the zombies themselves- that things were taking a turn.
I'll spare you the entire story because most of you are familiar with the beats of the classic tale. I'll just let you in on the things that drove me crazy. Fair warning-spoilers are from here on out.
The story opens up as zombies threaten to ruin not only Christmas, but all of London. And there's only one man in town rich enough to stop them, Ebenezer Scrooge. How does money equal safety? Um...they don't explain it, but it at least gets our two fundraisers from the original story to Scrooge's door asking for money and help. Of course he refuses and heads home to sulk.
The twist, we soon learn through the three ghosts, is that it's actually Scrooge who first contracted the zombie-making disease when he was bitten by his sick horse while attending the all-boys school in his past. Mere minutes after his bite, the horse deteriorates into a putrid corpse. But, oddly, Scrooge is just fine as he bandages up his arm and goes about his way.
The rest of his flashbacks-Fezziwig and with fiancé Belle-have scenes where he accidentally scratches people who later become zombies. He doesn't bite them. His blood doesn't really come into contact with them. He just accidently scratches them. I mean, trim your fingernails bro. And this is how the zombie epidemic starts.
Except for Scrooge. He never turns. I guess he's just a carrier monkey. Something else they don't explain.
Soon we arrive at Christmas present where we see the city is overrun by zombies. I assume it took a few decades to catch up to him.
We still have Christmas Future to contend with though. It's here where we see Tiny Tim has risen from the grave and has returned home to Cratchit's horror. Scrooge witnesses his future corpse rise up from his own gravestone before waking up on Christmas morning back to normal. He then dons his best clothes and heads down the street where he runs into the two gentlemen from the start. Like in the films he whispers something in their ear and they are taken aback at Scrooge's newfound generosity. Scrooge then makes his way to his nephew Fred's home to offer an apology. This all happens very casually even though there's a freakin' zombie outbreak happening all around them. I guess the zombies understand that Scrooge has turned over a new leaf and so let him walk on by thinking they'll hold off eating him until maybe after dinner. I don't know. If I thought that didn't make any sense--wait for it.
Scrooge makes his way to the cemetery where zombies have started to gather (finally), I guess now's the right time to eat him. But not before he makes a speech acknowledging the error of his ways and offers a sincere apology. Suddenly the "hungry death" as they call it just friggin' disappears. Magically...
Wut.
So was all this an allegory where lies, deceit and selfishness turned people into zombies? Not even their lies, etc. but just Scrooge's?? That's what we're going with? Wait-for real? Money and honesty took care of your zombie problem? God I wish you could see my face as I type this. How freakin' stupid.
There are several zombie adaptations out there that do a fair job at putting a spin on a classic, specifically Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, but this re-telling just makes no sense. Part of why I've labeled this as the worst comic I've ever read is because there's so much potential here to level up a Christmas classic that was squandered. Instead the writers just shoehorned in a zombie story while trying to keep all of the iconic scenes intact nearly word for word. The results are a fowl tasting cocktail where zombies become background noise to a story still trying to sell Christmas spirit. The two don't mix, and shouldn't. A better story would take aspects from both genre's and tell a new story using beloved characters within the London Dickens had already staged. The real mistake was making this a zombie story at all. It's much more Frankenstein's Monster with how they've sewed bits and pieces together, complete with a faulty brain.
