Zombie, Spaceship, Wastland, Vampires?

Not much new to report in Sanguine Diaryland. I’ve submitted two stories for publication, so now I just have to wait. I still have two other projects in the works. More on that later.

For this week’s entry,  I’m going to talk about a funny, interesting essay by the brilliant comedian, actor, and nerd extraordinaire, Patton Oswalt. If you’ve never seen or heard him do anything before, watch this clip:

Ok, good. Now you can read my essay, Zombie, Spaceship, Wasteland, Vampires?

“Are you a Zombie, a Spaceship, or a Wasteland?” So begins the eponymous essay of Patton Oswalt’s book, Zombie, Spaceship, Wasteland. Growing up, Oswalt and his friends devoured movies like Night of the Living Dead, Star Wars, and Road Warrior. As time passed, zombie, sci-fi, and post-apocalypse movies became part of his creative DNA, and he found the same thing applied to his friends as well. Therefore, he argues that creative people’s tend to adapt the characteristics of the genre that influences them the most. Here are the three categories Oswalt identifies, and what makes them unique: 

Zombies Simplify: The Zombie narrows the world to a “microcosm of archetypes, fighting for survival against the undead hordes.” The implication of a tight-knit community aside, the Zombie is a nihilist. The infrastructure of their world is still intact, but ultimately “Zombies can’t believe the energy we waste on nonfood pursuits.”

Spaceships Leave: For them, “it’s easier…to build a world and know its history or, better yet, choose the limited customs and rituals that fit the story.” They tend to work with computers and make good parents (“a good captain knows how to treat his crew”), but skim over the surface of the world, deflector shields up.

Wastelands Destroy: They have no interest in building a community of survivors, and “zooming off in a spaceship…smacks of retreat.” So they’re loners, wandering across a desolate world populated by mutants, who’re basically “variations of the human species grown amok.” But they are also “the most hopeful and sentimental of the bunch. Because…they conceive stories in which a core of humanity…survives and endures.”

Each category is interconnected. For example, Oswalt points out that “Darth Vader is, essentially, a Zombie, born in a Wasteland, who works on a Spaceship.”

“Every teen outcast who pursues a creative career,” he declares, “has, at its outset, either a Zombie, Spaceship, or Wasteland work of art in them.” And this opus usually stems from the nadir of adolescence. Oswalt finds that he is a Wasteland. During his freshman year of high school, he wrote two epic tales of post-apocalyptic antiheroes (apparently, they were both garbage). More importantly, comedians live on the road. They drift from town to town, living off cheap booze and nachos, “pointing out [to audiences] how so much of what we perceive as culture and society is disposable waste.”

Each category makes a lot of sense, and the essay does a great job explaining the personal roots of creativity. But Oswalt makes no grandiose claims here. His views reflect his experience, and his experience alone. He even goes so far as to explain, “I think this chapter is more for me than for you.”

Still, I really identify with what he says here. I was a teenage outcast, and I had varying levels of experience with those three genres. I grew up on Star Wars and, as a child of the nuclear ‘80s, watched my share of post-apocalyptic movies. There were other genres, too, most notably James Bond movies. But in my late teens and early twenties, I conceived of a wasteland-ish epic about a dystopian America, led by a dictator that waged a fierce, exterminationist war against fundamentalist christians. By my mid-twenties—which counts as one of the various nadirs of my adolescence—I had refined this story to the point of view of a soldier in said war, focusing on the grim choices she had to make to fulfill her ideological commitments (Thank you for your time, Mr. Spielberg. Really, there’s no need to call security).

But as much as Oswalt’s essay speaks to me, I still feel it’s incomplete. Where are the vampires? This is, after all, an essay written by a man who played a scientist who gets killed by vampires in Blade: Trinity. Granted, a reasonable person could say, ‘Well, maybe vampires weren’t that big a part of his childhood.’ But in the preface of Zombie Spaceship Wasteland, he confides that “Nosferatu looms over and lurks under everything I’m writing about here, and in this book.” Yeah. So there.

I won’t second guess Oswalt too much. I’m sure he had his reasons for sticking to those three tropes. But nothing is stopping me from adding my own experience to his model.

Vampires Detach: Unlike Zombies, they appreciate the complexity of the world around them, and they have no desire to zoom off in a Spaceship. Nor are they exactly solitary wanderers.  Vampires interact with other groups, but they tend to be disconnected and secretive. There are three basic kinds of vampire subcategories: decided vampires, self-conscious vampires, and people who kill vampires. In each case, the main character does not, can not, fit into society.

The detachment, the sense of seeing the world in a way that is irreconcilable with a proverbially normal life, often comes with a conceit of superiority. The decided vampire views people as edible playthings. For all their moping, self-conscious vampires are often compelled to show off their power as they divulge their awful knowledge. The vampire hunter protects the world from an unseen threat, so the very nature of their work makes them an outcast.

Look at it this way, Stoker made Dracula as much an anathema to all that is good and decent as he was hard to resist. Anne Rice’s Louis was sensitive and wise, but he was also so deprived of companionship that he wrestled with his turbid lust for Claudia, a vampire in the body of a prepubescent girl. Blade is skilled at killing vampires because he’s half-vampire, so he doesn’t have too many friends.

The Vampire’s alienation is rooted in their own capacity to be a monster. This is the final, deepest layer of the Vampire burrito. This is also why I know I am a Vampire. Teen outcast? Sheesh, I was socially awkward well into my thirties. So I spent a lot of time alone, usually in a room full of people. As a recovering alcoholic, I am also well aware of my ugliest capacities.

Without AA and multiple, daily entreaties to my Higher Power, I am a selfish, self-destructive douche who thrives on chaos. Left to my own devices, I’m the guy who shows up sloppy drunk to your party, presses your guests about the worst details of their lives, and assumes you won’t notice that I’m leaving with half of the beer from your fridge. It’s not as sexy as hypnotizing virgins and drinking their blood, but basically I can be about as white-knuckled over my appetites as Edward Cullen, Stefan Salvatore, or any other pretty-boy vampire who’s afraid to bite his girlfriend.

So that, my friends is my addition to Oswalt’s model. It’s not perfect, but no less so than the original. And like the original, it is strengthened by its overlap with other categories. For example, Buffy Summers is a Vampire slayer, who also fights her share of Zombies; her hometown of Sunnydale sits on a Hellmouth, which threatens to open and turn the world into a Wasteland; and at one point her mother is tormented by a Demon who crashed to Earth on a Spaceship.  So there.

In the Maw of "Meh": Mario Acevedo's Killing the Cobra

Well there's good news in Sanguine Diary Land. We have a winner for the giveaway. Jen Snyder of New York, New York won a free copy of the anthology Dark Light, with my story "Blood and Soil." The rest of you will just have to get one for yourselves. It's even free for Kindle if you're an Amazon Prime member. Yay!

Now, on to the rest. Here is my review of review of Mario Acevedo's graphic novel, Killing the Cobra:

In the Maw of "Meh": Mario Acevedo's Killing the Cobra:


Mario Acevedo’s novels are a lot of fun. Each one pits Felix Gomez, a vampire P.I., against absurd characters like lascivious aliens, vampire porn moguls, and mad scientists. And as far as vampires go, Gomez is pretty benevolent. When not drinking goat’s blood, he minimizes the damage to his human victims with hypnosis and saliva that can heal wounds. Gomez is also pretty resourceful, often favoring his wits over brute force. With titles like Jailbait Zombie and X-Rated Bloodsuckers, Acevedo’s novels brim with dark humor and a gritty, noir feel that seem like a great fit for a graphic novel crossover. And I still believe that is true, except that Killing the Cobra abandons the formula that makes the novels work.

As a story, Killing the Cobra is certainly cold-blooded, but in the wrong way. Gomez scowls and punches his way through each frame with none of the twisted humor that makes the novels enjoyable. Instead, Cobra makes Gomez a square-jawed hero who spits macho clichés about playing by his own rules.

The plot is simple enough, and actually too predictable. The Araneum, a sinister vampire syndicate for whom Gomez is a reluctant servant, has assigned him to take down a drug kingpin from Hong Kong. Gomez destroys a massive shipment of heroin, and the kingpin takes revenge by following Gomez to San Francisco and kidnapping his girlfriend. A lot of the story feels rushed, shuffling the plot from one action sequence to another, without building much in between.

Gomez’s relationship with his girlfriend, Qian Ning seems rote. In almost all of the novels, Felix has love interests and Acevedo always makes a little bit of room to develop the characters’ rapport. One scene in X-Rated Bloodsuckers, where a woman holds his hand and he has to pretend that her silver ring doesn’t hurt him, is a perfect example. Qian Ning is painted with too many broad strokes: she’s ‘good’ because she’s an ex-prostitute who runs a shelter for women escaping the sex industry. Beyond that, though, there’s very little to her character. This is too bad, a real missed opportunity for adding complexity to the plot.

Gomez is also drawn too broadly, despite the fact that the graphic novel is at its best when describing his experiences of the Iraq War. But for most of the story, Gomez just talks tough, telling thugs to mind their manners or reminding his contacts at the Araneum that he does things his way. Acevedo’s novels are not what one would call nuanced, but they work just fine. In the novels, Acevedo explains Gomez’s scars from the war and describes the parameters of his vampirism without slowing the plot. In Killing the Cobra, he not only changes the parameters, but explains things with needless redundancy. The Felix Gomez of the graphic novel completely abstains from human blood, which robs the character of a lot of interesting ambiguity. Practically every scene in Killing the Cobra explains that he’s a vampire, as if fangs, super strength, and imperviousness to bullets do not adequately convey this. On two separate occasions, it is explained that Araneum is latin for spider web. And this is one of those things that readers should be allowed to look up on their own.

I am way past the age where I take pleasure in harsh criticism, and it gives me no joy that Killing the Cobra falls flat. Honestly, I was looking forward to reading it. In fairness to Acevedo, the story was released in serial issues before being compiled into a graphic novel, so it’s entirely possible that poor sales or some other tremor of the publishing world cut the project short. If that’s the case, then it would explain why so many of the relationships lack depth and some of the more intriguing premises—like Qian Ning’s women’s shelter—were not adequately explored. But the dumbing down of Felix Gomez is still a disappointing mystery. Maybe Acevedo just didn’t know how to tell a story in a different medium. Either way, if you’re a fan of the novels, don’t bother with Killing the Cobra. And if you’ve never read Mario Acevedo, pick up Jailbait Zombie. It’s a lot of fun.