Saturday, October 20, 2012

Just another zombie story?

Hernandez, Gilbert. Fatima: The Blood Spinners. #1. Milwaukie, OR: Dark Horse Comics, 2012. 
As utterly uncool and disconnected as this sounds, I have to admit that I have no experience with the work of Los Bros. Hernandez. I do know that they are legendary, especially for their Love and Rockets series. And, I do own a few L & R comics as well as the ginormous Luba collection, which I bought when Fantagraphics first published it but which I still have yet to read. Such is pretty much the extent of my acquaintance with the productions of Los Hernandez. Knowing, though, that I really ought to know more about their work is precisely what prompted me to buy Gilbert Hernandez’s Fatima as soon as I saw it at Crazy Fred’s comic shop here in La Mesa, CA. That what I saw was issue #1 of 4 made it even more inviting. Rather than trying to get up to speed with something that had already been going on for some time without me (like the world of L & R), I would be entering a series from the beginning.
The cover of issue #1 shows the eponymous protagonist blasting away at what appears to be a group of zombies that encircles her. Right away this spoke to my interest in horror studies. But as enticing and intriguing as I found the idea of Hernandez offering his own zombie story, it also prompted in me a little reticence and concern. Like the perfectly good genre of Gothic fiction (which in the last few years has been diluted and otherwise ruined by Twilight and the numerous other Gothic knock-offs that now take up too much shelf space at Barnes & Noble), the zombie genre has been overdone in recent years in different sectors of our popular culture.[1] Given the proliferation of zombie texts ranging from Walking Dead to Zombie Musical to Zombies vs. Strippers, I wondered: would Hernandez’s comic say or show anything new or interesting amidst the recent flood of zombie texts? Why would Hernandez choose to work within an already glutted field? To what ends would Hernandez use the genre? With so much to his name already, I figured this could not be a case of Hernandez merely riding or cashing in on the popularity of the zombie genre. Or, at least this is what I hoped.
The story begins with a bloodbath. A well-armed, well-muscled Fatima is blasting away hordes of zombies. Heads explode, eyeballs fly out of their sockets, and blood splatters across the panels. In one panel, Fatima even manages to take out three zombies with one shot (a bullet passes through the open mouths of three zombies lined up one behind the other). The first panel after the title page (which, on a visual level, uses darkness to set up Fatima as a character with an intriguing story to be told) functions as a curious opening strategy. As it brings the reader face to face with a zombie who has a bullet hole in his forehead, it is an interesting play on the usual self-other dynamics operant in zombie texts. A lot of work on zombie texts has elaborated on the ways that the zombie assumes the status of abject other. Its lack of subjectivity, its cannibalism, and its status as a corpse—which Julia Kristeva figures as the epitome of the abject—render it utterly “not-us,” radically alien to “our” civilized world and nature and formulations of selfhood. In spite of its apparent otherness, however, the zombie is actually an uncanny figure because it both is and is not human. The semblance is there, but the subjectivity is not. Consequently, the zombie emerges as an unnerving, unsettling figure who sort of resembles—and, thus, is—“us,” but also doesn’t, and so isn’t. Because the zombie thus eludes categorization, troubling our ability to differentiate between “us” and “them,” one thing that zombie texts like to play on and with is our insistence that the zombie is not-us. Indeed, the more interesting kinds of texts are the ones that deny us the easy ability to figure the zombie as radically other. Along these lines, Fatima mentions that for her, “recent converts” are “the hardest to kill” (6) because their humanity still shows through.
Incidentally, the self-other dynamics operant in zombie texts bring to mind Kristeva’s work on abjection and identity formation, namely her description of the latter’s dependence on the existence and repression of the former. In Powers of Horror, her famous essay on abjection, Kristeva notes that “Excrement and its equivalents (decay, infection, disease, corpses, etc.) stand for the danger to identity that comes from without: the ego threatened by the non-ego, society threatened by its outside, life by death” (71). Because the abject thus “disturbs identity, system, order” (4), it prompts its own suppression and repression. The orgy of killing that we see at the start of Fatima sets up the zombies, in no uncertain terms, as the walking abject, as others to be exterminated because they disturb order in the fashion described by Kristeva. For Fatima, and by extension the reader, the zombies threaten the line between life and death, society and chaos, and ego and non-ego (which is to say, socialized subject and mindless non-subject). As the panels accrue, we see more and more of “them” threatening the “us” that Fatima embodies. In effect, we see dramatized the stakes of the suppression and repression of the abject. Fatima fending off the zombies that threaten to engulf her illustrates Kristeva’s notion of “our” vulnerable relationship to the abject: “[The abject] lies outside, beyond the set, and does not seem to agree to the latter’s rules of the game. And yet, from its place of banishment, the abject does not cease challenging its master” (2). In both Kristeva and Fatima, there is an urgency to our ability to suppress/repress the abject.  
As the narrative unfolds we learn that this is another human-hatched/self-inflicted zombie outbreak. A new illegal drug, Spin, has turned out to be “the worst, most addictive drug ever conceived.” According to Fatima, Spin is so potent that “in a matter of hours it’s zombietime” for users. Symbolically this narrative concoction extends the effects of addiction to its extreme. In this manner, Fatima falls in line with other zombie-outbreak stories that function as cautionary tales for humanity. But while a relevant route to follow, the zombie genre seems rather obvious for a narrative about drugs gone awry. Then again, this is only the first issue of the series, and so I will withhold judgment until I see where Hernandez goes with this narrative strand.
As a flashback, we see that Fatima used to be part of some police force (to which she only refers as “Operations”) that was involved in a raid on Mr. Bittermeat, a Spin druglord. Obviously the motivation for the raid is to contain the threat that Spin and the zombie outbreak constitute. When Fatima and the other agents descend to the drug lord’s property—under the guise of invisibility technology—they start shooting away at the individuals they encounter. Notably, this is not much different from the sight of Fatima shooting away at the zombies she encounters in the opening pages of the comic. In both instances, we see desperate efforts to “stop the disease from spreading y’know” (9).
Fundamentally Hernandez portrays the desire to eradicate that which threatens order (at least as we know it). As occurs in Hollywood films, guns are a favorite means for eliminating that which threatens our order. In this comic, as with most zombie texts, we see that regardless of how much shooting Fatima and the others may do, there are still more zombies out there and seemingly more emerging all the time. Such entropy puts the individual in a position of wavering between fatalism and hope, which might help to explain Fatima’s attitude of “whatever.” With this attitude, she seems to be protecting herself from being bothered by life. That said, maybe Hernandez intends to take his zombie story toward a meditation on the devastating existential implications of the seemingly entropic tendencies of life?
Left as we are by this first issue, it goes without saying that I await seeing where this series goes. In particular, I wonder how Hernandez will differentiate his work from the numerous other zombie texts already out there. To borrow from Harold Bloom and his Anxiety of Influence, what “swerves” will Hernandez execute with his foray into the zombie genre? Will he be able to both work within and bend the zombie genre in original ways? Will “stronger” precursor zombie texts show some kind of influence over the work (either in the form of an inability to escape this previous work or/and too much effort to not repeat it)? Editor Diana Schutz promises that the series will “live up to…lofty expectations,” which leaves me hopeful for the fate of this zombie text.

--phillip serrato, san diego state university
Works Cited
Batti, Bianca L. The Undead Ingestion of the Self: Cannibalistic Identity Formation and Ghoulish Subjectivity in Zombie Literature. San Diego, CA: San Diego State U, 2012.

Bloom, Harold. The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry. New York: Oxford UP, 1973.
Kristeva, Julia. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. Trans. Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia UP, 1982.


[1] Bianca Batti offers illuminating, theoretically savvy readings of some recent zombie texts in her Master’s thesis The Undead Ingestion of the Self: Cannibalistic Identity Formation and Ghoulish Subjectivity in Zombie Literature.