Hockey Zombie: Two Terrible Tastes That Taste Terribler Together

What do you get when you take a regular webcomic and give it a shitty writer? Well a lot of webcomics come out of that formula, I suppose, but one result is Hockey Zombie, a comic which combines zombies (on which my views have already been expressed) and hockey (on which my views don't need to be expressed because hockey is a dumb sport played by Canadians who can't be bothered to play something resembling a real sport. Chris van Gompel decided to combine these two atrocities in some sick, twisted effort to create the biggest atrocity in the history of atrocities.

Hockey Zombie has so many terrible strips it is hard to know where to begin. I guess blatant racism would be a good start, though. HZ also qualifies as a gamer comic. Heh. Portal. Unfortunately, most of the game comics don't require the game reference at all. Others are just plain disgusting. Some are both. None are good.

Van Gompel likes to think himself as some great crusader for Internet Justice. By jumping on the bandwagons of hating e-famous villains, he obviously hopes to pull in more readers and gain e-fame himself. Not so sadly, no amount of hatred bandwagoning will make Hockey Zombie popular, and maybe van Gompel should just focus on making shitty comics without a political agenda.

Another failed attempt at garnering e-glory can be seen in Hockey Zombie's technically annual Shark Week, where van Gompel rotoscopes some fucking sharks and puts retarded words in their mouths. The sharks always look terrible, and the jokes never take advantage of the sharks. Effectively it's a dumb, half-assed gimmick that doesn't accomplish anything.

The thing about Hockey Zombie is that it started out as a serial with a really dumb plot. However, as time progressed the comic was interrupted by more and more one-off pages, and pretty soon the "plot" was forgotten. That's okay, it was terrible. It was just a bunch of zombie jokes that have been told an infinite number of times until they got so old that they were in a nursing home when John McCain was born. But what it was replaced with was a terrible amalgamation of awful gimmicks and shitty cheap gags. Read more→

Dead Winter: Another Damn Zombie Story

Zombies are an incessant cliche. There's not much left to be said about them that hasn't been said already. Their use as a metaphor for human nature is good, but tired, and their origins from unchecked and unprepared biological research are familiar and repetitive. Effectively, there is not much left to be said regarding zombies that hasn't been said already. However, my good friend 'S. Dave Shabat' believes differently.

Forming the same rag-tag group of urban citizens who happen to be well equipped with the knowledge and technical skills to survive a zombie infestation, just like almost every zombie movie, book, comic and game to date, Shabat seems to be drawing parallels between life before and after the zombie outbreak, and how both are so boring that the only color worth coloring is on the two main characters, the badass hitman and a british poet-slash-waitress. Exception occurs when the waitress is struck with mild delerium and her subconscious takes over forcing her to address issues her conscious mind is oblivious to. Unfortunately this issue is generally "What should I wear today?" rather than anything which would lead to personal growth and development.

The other main character, a professional hit man, fulfills the role of "kicking ass and smoking cigarettes while wearing custom-made sunglasses to look like a total badass heck yeah!" In actuality, his badasseries create little more than a flat character who is good for nothing more than getting the group out of a tight spot where kind words and esoteric facts won't suffice. While handy when surrounded by mindless killing contraptions, it doesn't provide much for the sake of narrative.

I offered Mr. Shabat a chance to interview, in an effort to defend his work, but realizing how hard-hitting my journalism was, he smartly refused to answer my pointed questions. Unfortunately, I don't give up that easily and decided to answer my own questions on his behalf:

Anti-Snark: So you decided to make a story about zombies, in a world where zombie stories are already plenty damn plentiful. What was your reason?

S. Dave Shabat: I had been playing a lot of Dead Rising lately and zombies are just really cool. Especially the way they're like, weak alone but find their strength in numbers? That's definitely really awesome.

AS: Which character do you identify with the most?

DS: Definitely Liz. I think she and I are on the same intellectual wavelength and have the same interests, but we're also pretty different. For instance, she has a nicer rack. But soon I hope to fix that.

AS: I really like Lou. You're not gonna kill him off, are you?

DS: Well normally I wouldn't kill and tell, but I wasn't planning on killing him. Of course, now that I know he's your favorite, you can consider him dead by Halloween.

AS: What kind of formal training or experience do you have?

DS: I have a Cintiq tablet. In this industry, that's all anyone needs.

AS: Well, thank you for talking with me

DS: No problem, it was either this or going to my grandmother's funeral.

Dead Winter is another boring, cliche comic about zombies giving us the same old narrative with the same old characters. Generally, I prefer comics to give me something unique and generally whimsical, rather than being stale and familiar. Ultimately, we all know how Dead Winter will end, because we've all seen ____ of the Dead, or played Resident Evil, or read any comic about zombies. Essentially they're all the same. I know what killed Dead Winter, and it wasn't a zombie. It was old age. Read more→