Line of thought on zombies ...

http://www.nukees.com/comics/nukees20091002.gif

discuss ... ;)

The comic fails to mention gibbing them with a grenade launcher.

That's true. How many people do you know have explosives though?

...what?

I always thought zombies were the half-chewed corpses. You never see zombies walking around with their head open. They're always the ones who were just bitten or whatever.

In related news, I watched Peter Jackson's Braindead for the first time yesterday. Good times.

This comic sucks foul corpse dick.

Danarchy said:

I always thought zombies were the half-chewed corpses. You never see zombies walking around with their head open. They're always the ones who were just bitten or whatever.

In related news, I watched Peter Jackson's Braindead for the first time yesterday. Good times.

Well that works. Doesn't explain the large crowds of zombies in movies though, you'd think the zombies would finish off corpse brains versus live ones, so only survivors would turn into zombies, making it kinda hard to have large zombie waves.

If vampires can't stand the taste of stale blood - zombies might be just as picky when it comes to brains, so they go after the living instead of cannibalising the dead. Do they eat the entire brain? Unlikely, they'd have to leave some bits behind in newly created zombies to co-ordinate motor functions and process sensory input.

Technician said:

This comic sucks foul corpse dick.

Have you looked at the blond guy's hair in the first panel? He looked like an exposed brain!!

This is the opposite of funny. It is ANTI-FUNNY.

In some zombie movies, the explanation for zombification was virulent or bacterial in nature, and what was actually taken over were parts of the central nervous system, not just the brain per-se.

As long as the spinal cord is mostly intact, zombies can function and walk around, and even see normally if the relevant parts of the brain are still there (but it could be just the bacteria/viruses organising themselves to provide them with directions for finding food/rudimentary sight and smell etc.).


...


We're really overanalyzing this, aren't we?

The half-dead zombie, with decaying flesh, huge gaping wounds, missing limbs and organs, and so on, cannot make sense however you cut it.

Something like the original vodou zombi (someone who's actually completely drugged-up and brainwashed) and a "zombie plague" that works like the rabies (still a normal, living organism, but the conscious mind is overcome by feverish rage, as in 28 days/week/months/year/whatever later) are theoretically possible to some extent.

Well....a corpse with enough limbs to walk around and enough nerves to control them could be in theory be controlled by anything that can interface to those nerves, be it a human-made controller or a parasitic organism (bacteria/virus/"pod"-like parasite). The only thing limiting them would be the stored energy resources (no metabolism -> no energy for muscles to use in the long term) unless the parasite somehow worken around that issue.

As zombies get weaker we get stronger

Mr. Freeze said:
This is the opposite of funny. It is ANTI-FUNNY.

It provokes a sort of inhaled laughter!

The entire brain can't be devoured until the victim turns and walks himself. Being able to function with a partially destroyed brain and depressurization of the cranium is a case of zombie brain plasticity.

I think we're dealing with two different types of zombies. Especially in George Romero's Dawn of the Dead, a zombie bite anywhere on your body would cause zombification. It also makes that statement in the Zombie Survival Handbook my brother bought me as a christmas present.

Zombies eating brains is more reminiscent to the Halloween style zombies rising from the grave. Those zombies (If I recall correctly) can be killed just like any other human being could.

Modern zombies are really re-imagined ghouls as I understand it. Ghouls generally have the same characteristics as zombies, except maybe for the infectious bite and brain eating part.

Zombies, if undead, are impossible without magic. A corpse quickly undergoes rigor mortis, which renders the body stiff and inflexible. The tissues also begin to decay and become relatively fragile. Zombies created by a disease or plague are possible, given that there are a number of diseases that produce relatively similar characteristics, such as rabies. Voodoo zombies are sort of possible, assuming no magic is involved, as it is possible to drug or brainwash someone enough that they would do your bidding.

In terms of fiction, anything goes. :p Honestly, of the three types, Voodoo zombies are the most interesting and too rarely seen these days.

You know, the only zombie movie I remember watching where they were explicitly going for brains was Return of the Living Dead, and that was almost a satirical zombie film. George Romero's movies, the new Dawn of the Dead, Braindead, etc. had zombies that were really just general cannibals.

^ Yeah, that's what I was thinking.

Also. in some movies. The Evil dead in particular. No matter how much you hack them up. The separate pieces still live on.

Danarchy said:

In related news, I watched Peter Jackson's Braindead for the first time yesterday. Good times.

which shows us zombies can reproduce sexually a-ok!

kristus said:

Also. in some movies. The Evil dead in particular. No matter how much you hack them up. The separate pieces still live on.

The zombies. In the Return of. The Living Dead series. Were also. Unkillable.

Brain-eating isn't really a common theme in zombie movies, so I'm not sure why it's such a big part of the zombie stereotype. Was the Return of the Living Dead series really that popular?

I suppose it's just the goofiness of these shambling corpses walking around moaning "braaaaiiiiiiiinnnnzzzz" that had something especially memorable.

DoOmEr4LiFe said:

The comic fails to mention gibbing them with a grenade launcher.

Throwing any mythical creature into the Sun would do the trick too, but it also goes without saying.

40oz said:

I think we're dealing with two different types of zombies. Especially in George Romero's Dawn of the Dead, a zombie bite anywhere on your body would cause zombification.

Actually, Romero's zombies were caused by some external, unexplained force. Everyone that dies becomes a zombie regardless of cause. A bite just caused infection and accelerated death.

david_a said:
The zombies. In the Return of. The Living Dead series. Were also. Unkillable.

I. Bet that is. How zombies would. Punctuate. If. They could write. No?

Nomad said:

Actually, Romero's zombies were caused by some external, unexplained force. Everyone that dies becomes a zombie regardless of cause. A bite just caused infection and accelerated death.

That's true. I forgot about that.

I have encountered a related argument before. (I thought it was in a Dinosaur Comic, but couldn't find it.) Whether or not a zombie's primary goal is to eat brains, zombies are actually too effective as killers for their plague to spread. In the vast majority of cases (in most zombie films), humans who succumb to zombie attack are entirely dismembered and destroyed - meaning that these unfortunate individuals cannot possibly go on to infect other humans. We can see essentially this same situation with some real-world pathogens, which are likely to incapacitate and kill infected individuals before they have a proper chance to spread their contagion. For a zombification-causing pathogen to be successful, it would have to take control of the host's nervous system, and then give the host an uncontrollable, mindless urge to spread the virus with a single mild bite, or with other methods. For example, the idea of a zombie plague that creates the uncontrollable, mindless urge to rape instead of murder now seems so obvious that I'm sure this very movie can be found behind a clattering bead curtain somewhere.