dead Eyes open
Written by: Matthew Shepherd
Drawn by: Roy Boney Jr.

How would society cope if people started coming back from the dead? You might first picture images of graying corpses, reaching up from their darkened graves; coming back and craving flesh, brains, live meat.

Back track a little and imagine a landscape where people return from the dead, but they’re not at all the same as the zombies portrayed in Dawn of the Dead or Night of the Living Dead. Instead of being devoid of thought and merely consumed by the need for fresh meat, they’re unchanged by the act of death. They simply die and experience the feeling of their heart ceasing, blood slowing to a halt, breath dissolving into…nothing.

Like death, they’re devoid of life but only in the physical sense. Their minds, their ether, the part of them that is intangible remains behind after death. They can still walk, talk, think, act like a living person. But they’re technically dead.

When I bought dead Eyes open yesterday, I thought I was buying a zombie graphic novel. I figured it’d follow the typical zombie/horror plotline where the zombies are the enemy and us living folk do our best not to have our limbs ripped off by decaying, yellow zombie teeth. I’m not going to lie. The over-done zombie plot is always somehow exciting. I still find myself craving the delicious gore and guts that come with anything zombie related. And I still always get excited by the strange voice in the back of my head that wonders if zombies could ever really happen. But as I read on, I realized this book was not only almost anti-zombie genre, it also manages to spin the entire played-out zombie plot on its head and makes it, dare I say, better.

While the storyline jumps around frequently and is only occasionally hard to follow, it’s mostly about Dr. John Requin, a mild-mannered psychologist turned “Returner”. Instead of zombies, they’re called Returners (or more-affectionately, “deadies”).

My only complaint about this book was that it was probably trying to accomplish a little too much within its pages. The idea that a zombie is a zombie and has no emotions or thoughts is pretty engrained within our horror culture. Zombies are heartless and soulless and that’s just how it is (unless you’ve seen the movie Dead and Breakfast in which case zombies are hilarious! Rent it if you can find it!) But Shepherd and Boney Jr. are reaching beyond the norm and contemplating how we might feel about ourselves if we Returned.

As Dr. Requin is thrown into the outing of people considered to be Returners, “normal” living people are unsure about the new culture’s status as human beings. If they’re dead do they automatically lose their jobs? If they’re dead, should they be allowed to have custody of their children? The Returners all claim to be the same people they were before they died. So would they be the same kind of parents or coworkers? You might think logically that they would be but what happens as the parent’s body rots and the children are then afraid? What happens when your coworker’s skin drips off of them while on a coffee break?

But seriously, this book has crazy ramifications if you’re willing to stretch your imagination. As the story continues, Returners are faced with internment camps where the government intends to destroy them all. Returners everywhere are being “re-murdered” by living people who don’t understand or don’t want to. For all intents and purposes, it’s a kind of holocaust. Hitler exists metaphorically via the government and its minions who try anything to eliminate the mess instead of dealing with it. But is this how we as humans deal with things? Do we simply try to rid ourselves of the problem by destroying it rather than attempting to understand and live with it?

I’ll probably think of this book every time I throw away a tupperware container instead of just cleaning out the molding food inside and keeping the container. Why is it always more simple to just take the easy way out of things? Is it just our nature to sweep it under the rug; out of sight, out of mind?

In the end the Returners want to force the living to deal with the problem rather than exterminate it. If only the real world were so caring.

*Side note: I give props to the authors for subtitling one of the chapters, “Slouching towards New Amsterdam.” For those of you not in the literary “know” this is a reference to Charles Bukowski’s book, Slouching Toward Nirvana. Bukowski is known for his negativity and doubts about the world and its inhabitants. Perhaps this reference means the authors secretly think the negativity will dominate over reason and the human race will just choose the easy way out. I guess it could go either way, but we won’t know until it happens.