2 out of 5

Is Tales of the Zombie a “classic” Marvel strip?  Its had a repackaged reprint, and I think there’s a general respect for the era of Marvel magazines from which Zombie sprang, but the era was also sort of short-lived – this title was ten issues plus an annual, about a 2.5 year run – and the series’ featured character, one Simon Garth, hasn’t had all that many subsequent appearances, beyond being updated by a requisite few people who remembered him and did their comic history duty of trying to refresh and renew.

There are some notable things about Simon Garth’s strips, but overall its not the most compelling of stories or character, and the magazine itself was a pretty uneven mess, beyond even the “make it up as we go” feeling most of those mags had.  In other words, I feel like this may be “classic” due to nostalgia and not so much because of any specialness of the content.  After all, while something like Dracula Lives can boast the recognizability of the “signature” vampire, there is no mascot zombie.  And Tales was just back-doored into things to ride the wave of Night if the Living Dead, which is one of our culture’s rare peaks with zombie obsession, the other main one (in my revisionist take on history, anyway) centered around The Walking Dead, which maybe maybe bit coincidentally coincided with another Marvel bandwagon via its Marvel Zombies titles, and wouldn’t ya’ know it, a reappearance of Simon Garth.

So: Having sufficiently spit on some rose tinted glasses and a bunch of people’s creative work from decades ago, on to the review!

Tales of the Zombie The Magazine was formed around a pre-code horror yarn by Stan Lee and Bill Everett about a dude raised from the dead to commit some misdeeds… who, in the strip’s attempted twist ending, can’t act as commanded because he’s been sent to off his own daughter.  It’s a well drawn and written little blurb, but by no means the most memorable horror short you’re going to read.  And yet, editor Roy Thomas decided to use this as a springboard – Why?  Because the name Simon Garth was cool? for their new horror mag, with Steve Gerber and (from issue 2 on) artist Pablo Marcos tasked with structuring a story based on that Lee / Everett niblet.  Elsewhere, the magazine had voodoo / zombie themed reprints, articles or fiction on the same, and eventually some Brother Voodoo stories as well.  This all varied wildly issue by issue, as though the editor couldn’t figure out exactly what to do with the series, which filtered down to Simon Garth – the only mostly consistent feature – as well.  By the time Toby Isabella came in to revamp things – less non-fiction, more Brother Voodoo – it was pretty late in the game and the series soon ended.  The quarterly mags were overall a bit of an experiment for Marvel, but the unevenness with Tales seemed especially rough; features – even part ones of stories – never lasted beyond an issue or were completed non-publication-sequentially, and the murky zombie / voodoo focus encouraged, it seemed, an attempt to “specialize” by being more “accurate” than the entertainment peers at the time, which in practice resulted in referencing the same books or concepts over and over.  Hey, you used Haitian voodoo terms look “humfo” ad nauseam; good for you.  And for reasons I don’t really get, people always seem to hate backfilling pages with reprinted material, so even though I felt they dug up some well chosen bits for inclusion, this was pushed out more and more as the title went on.  (I do sort of get it, as a rant for another time, but in summary: If you’re upset about paying for old material, you can’t tell me that, even then, the Zombie readers had read every strip that was being reprinted, i.e. it is, essentially, new to you.)

The overall impact was thus minimal; the series had little identity to fuel it, and was certainly coasting off of cool covers (Boris Vallejo and Earl Norem) and – as one of the more notable aspects of the Garth strip – a willingness to get really macabre.  If you have to beg your readers to write in – yes, this happened on the letters page –  it can suggest they don’t have much to say.

Focusing on the Gerber bit, while Steve was no stranger to stepping up to another’s creation and making it his own, the few details available regarding Garth in the Lee-scripted strip really seemed to encourage Steve’s worst inclinations.  Garth was a horribly selfish and abusive rich fatcat before being zombies; he had a daughter.  The voodoo rite to change him requires a medallion on a string around his neck that gives the owner of its mate zombie controlling powers.  That’s… what we start with.  And Gerber and, for issue one John Buscema, add to it with a lot of incredibly cliched dialogue and some story / art miscues that scream rush-job over epic.  And this is where I mean that Gerber backed himself up into an uninteresting corner: Using wooden characters as vehicles to explore other concepts was also a frequently used device by the writer, but it felt like he kept getting distracted with trying to make it a horror book to really work on the interesting aspect of Garth’s evolution: That he was a soulless man and became a soulless corpse.  There are undeniable narration similarities to the observational style of Man-Thing, but Manny had no agenda whereas the zombie’s plots are often motivated by people literally using him in some way.  Seeing Garth’s lack of morality enacted via extreme and sudden violence, plus the occasional hints of his half-remembered humanity (such as in the strip’s best story, the two-part ‘The Law and Phillip Bliss’, when Zombie wanders into his old office and sits in his old chair) are where Steve found a little magic, but otherwise it’s just monster fights and soap opera scuffles for the medallion plus excessive voodoo references, from the same sources the rest of the mag was drawing from and thus equally repetitive and surface.  And its not just Steve’s fault: There just wasn’t anything much to do with the character as-is.  When Doug Moench does a fill-in story in issue 6, it amounts to Garth watching another story take place through a window, i.e. “I don’t know what to do with this guy either.” But at least that fill-in gave us wonderful Alfredo Alcala art, stepping in for the stiffer Marcos.  A shame that, had the series continued, Alcala was slated to be the regular and THAT would have been nifty, but at the same time… great art does not a great book make.

For the end of his run (which seemed to be random, as he has a blurb on the letters page without mentioning it and the next issue preview promises more Gerber), Steve tries one more time to find his footing but delivers his worst story yet: A cliche of old man “these teens and their rock and roll” curmudgeonliness, featuring teens who are drawn like 30 year olds, and capped off with one of the most non-sensical and non-impactful “twists” yet.  “Oh no!” we might go, if any of the characters had had personality.

I mentioned art slips as well; some brief words on that: In general, while Marcos delivers some fine panels here and there and his splash pages are atmospheric enough, he has an odd grip on anatomy, with Simon’s abs gnarled in a particularly odd (as in supposed-to-look-muscular-but-just looks-weird) fashion.  And this is a partial writing quip, but I was always bothered that Garth’s zombie-controlability was due to a dumb looking snake medallion (symbol inherited from the origin story, alas), and more obnoxiously, that it just dangled by the most flimsy looking thread.  For all the times he was shot and burned, that thing would go flying off, and foe the various people who want to give him rest… just take off the medallion?  Filed in the art column ’cause the groovy jewelry seemed very much a fashion concession and not a logical detail.  For the whammy, it starts how you start: Garth dies in a suit, and then, unless I missed the context, no more than a few hours (if that) pass before he’s dug up… and he’s completely rotted and in ragged clothes.  Part of the zombie spell?  No one speaks to it.  Methinks that’s just how zombies were supposed to look…

Tale of the Zombie was way too shaky of a concept to base a magazine around, which is why some talented folks failed at it.  There are minor moments of interest in both the feature and extras, but on the whole, it’s a magazine (yuk yuk, wait for it…) without heart.