Dumb and Ditzy
For Zombie Escape, the OCT
Featuring Marcus by artist Nerdwonder
Behind Mary
Mary is. An absolute joy.
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Both to draw and to write for, she's fun and crazy and 100% unhinged post-apocalypse. Her character is very obviously inspired by the "final girl" archetype of horror flicks and of course the "dumb blond" of all too many teenage coming of age films. I've always found the mixing of the two concepts to be wonderfully hilarious, the idea of this blond bimbo bumbling around in a zombie apocalypse, somehow surviving until the very end through sheer luck and impeccable fashion sense.
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To make Mary really unique, I came the second idea of: what if she's not even alive in the first place? What if she's just a dumb dead in denial, who really is just out to have fun? And that's when the stitches were born.
One cannot deny the influence of the forever iconic Lollipop Chainsaw and the newly released Barbie movie.
Her final design combines all things pretty and pink with the subtle horror of being stitched back together.
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Aside from the persistent bubblegum pink, heart imagery is littered all over her design. From her little earrings, to the cutout in her blouse, to the way her twintails create the silhouette of a heart around her head (maybe its to make up for her lack of a beating one?)
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While her clothes remain as colorful as ever, her skin is a more pallid shade of green-ish grey, stitches litter her body, still caked with blood and of course, theres the mismatched eyes, a hint to probably one of my favorite parts of her character.
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It's quite hard distinguishing your own body parts from others when trying to put yourself back together.
INTRO: Torn at the Seams
There were 3 main goals I wanted to get across in Mary's comic:
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She's a high school cheerleader, and was unfortunately caught off guard by the apocalypse during some football game.
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She's dead, but not really. She can pull herself back together (quite literally) and its not a very nice process.
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She's optimistic, but kinda dumb. She always looks on the brighter side of things, but there's a part of her that inevitably will realize the reality of her new world.
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Those were the top three points I wanted to make sure were clear through the comic, and thus a lot of my script revolved around that. First, the cheerleading aspect was the easiest to establish, but instead of just outright saying that she's a cheerleader and now its the apocalypse, the setting and intro was planned to emphasize the suddenness of the apocalypse's arrival, and the utter carnage it left behind. This has become the new reality of Mary's town.
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The starting sports game gives a hint of her upbeat personality, and the happiness and liveliness of the school which only pushes the stark contrast of the utter silence that comes after the apocalypse. The bright lights from the stands transitions the dark background to the stark, silent white, a common indicator in comics that the time is transitioned into the present. Mary's cheer is interrupted by the announcement for evacuation, a quite obvious metaphor for how the apocalypse interrupted and cut short the lives of everyone in the stadium
This final panel from that page is a touch on goal 3, showing off Mary's personality. She's trying to hold onto her cheer, even when everything else has gone silent and she's left alone with her pained, confused thoughts.
This is all meant to feed into goal 2: Mary is very much dead.
The panelling in the first half lays it out simple: Mary is torn apart, definitely supposed to be dead. The panels themselves are fragmented and overlapping, her limbs all thrown apart and mismatched.
The second half begins the stitched together motif, and the spiraling shape of the panels represents Mary's own spiraling mental state, dead set on one thing and one thing only: survival. The focus on the eye is also purposefully done, as is with the previous panels of her face, is to hide the fact that she loses one of her eyes in the carnage.
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The repeated verse of "I don't wanna die" is an innocent, pained phrase. Her repetition emphasizes her desperation, a stark contrast to the carefree personality she displayed earlier.
What follows is the switch, the quote on quote, "plot twist" in the tone of the comic. Mary is seemingly genuinely happy about this sudden turn of events, her shallow concerns in the back and forth sequence giving off very much bimbo dumb blond vibes (which she absolutely is, all contributing to point three). Another small detail, the background disappears after Mary sees herself in the mirror, the bloodied grass beneath her feet is suddenly clean and there are no blood covered stands in the background of any of her panels. Almost as if her true reality gets lost within this fog of delusion, of self-soothing ignorance.
And at the end of it all, Mary is just prepared to walk it all off, her own form of escapism. The progressing on the right side reminds her of the truth, however. In the panels, it's almost like shes trying to walk off the page, walk out of the panel, as if to escape the bounds of her reality, even as the background darkens to reflect the real state of the world around her.
These last few panels, however, are a stark reminder to all the death that actually occurred. The bloody turf comes back, now directly under her feet. The stands of the stadium are silent and lonely, devoid of light and life even as the sun rises to mark a new day, a sign that the apocalypse is real and here to stay, even as time goes on there's no going back to how things used to be.
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And even as Mary wants to walk out of her reality, as seen in the 3-panel sequence on the top right half of the page, the final panel on the very bottom drags her down to the very middle, and the panel itself condenses down, shrinks to almost trap Mary and her tears.
ROUND 2: Guns 101
This comic was incredibly fun to work on, even as rushed as it was. My opponent this time around was Marcus, a college student that Mary recognized as going to the same high school as her before the apocalypse happened. He was a great contrast to her optimism and confidence, a scrawny little kid whose number one option for any encounter was to just run away.
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Mary, at this point, had already gone through the worst of the apocalypse. She’s died once over, and gotten close to it again more than enough times to have it mess up her mind just a little. She’s absolutely abandoned all sense of reason and safety, her undead nature only contributing to her reckless abandon. This makes her the perfect “teacher” for Marcus in a way, who has not yet felt the thrill of being able to live to the fullest.
This whole comic was really an experiment in subtle ways of storytelling through formatting. The very obvious symbolism starts with color, of course. Mary almost always has a hint of color on her character throughout the entire comic. Even in her first appearance on the first page is slightly tinted pink.
Marcus, by contrast is always stuck in black and white. Not only does it serve to make Mary stand out in the strictly monochrome environment, it just as effectively blends Marcus into the background.
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Then comes the second aspect. Paneling.
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Mary is almost always breaking the panel in some way, either some part of her silhouette sticking out of the borders or her just not being framed in a panel at all. She's not limited by the boundaries of the pitch black lines, so she's able to act a lot freer in her movements in relation to her panels compared to Marcus.
The combined use of both color and panel breaking serve to give Mary the freedom her character exudes; her presence almost breaks the preplanned expectations of a comic's format, like the way her demeanor breaks Marcus' expectations of how he should be acting in the zombie apocalypse. The end goal for me with Marcus' character was for him to finally take that plunge in fighting back against the apocalypse, joining Mary in the quote on quote, "no panel club".
And what better way to learn than with a gun?
The bullet Marcus fires literally breaks through the paneling, through the zombie's head and right out the back. Its followed by a stream of color, bright pinks and teals swirling around the shot's trajectory as it fires through the black and white of the zombie skull.
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The next not-panel is a burst of color and shapes, as finally, finally Marcus joins Mary outside the confines of a panel and takes on some color of his own.
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Mary's head, free from the monster's grasp, gives a knowing smile and makes a mental note that maybe she should find a job at a firing range after this is all over.
