From the Kickstarter Front we’ve got what could be the most complete map of zombies ever created in vintage medical illustration! (Well it could be the only one to ever be created in that style as well..) Still, it looks awesome and it’s a great pickup if you are looking for some original zombie wall art.
A vintage medical illustration-style poster identifying over 350 different zombie types from movies, books, games & more.
In the past 10 years, humanity has cowered before an endless horde of zombies. Since “28 Days Later”, 2004’s “Dawn of the Dead”, “Land of the Dead” and Max Brooks’ books, zombies have become the most popular monster of the 21st century. Everyone’s making zombie movies, in India, Pakistan, Taiwan, Japan, Argentina, Cuba and Greece. Everyone’s writing zombie books, from survivalist/prepper adventure epics to gory horror to sci-fi weirdness to the dreaded zom-com.
But what ARE “zombies”? How many different forms of undead and not-really-undead have gone by the zombie name? As a horror fan, when I hear that something has “zombies,” I want to know: are they fast zombies or slow zombies? Viral zombies, supernatural zombies or alien-invasion zombies? Headshot zombies, living zombies or writhing-severed-limbs zombies? Crazed, unreasonable people who are alive but act ‘zombie-like’? Voodoo zombies, cannibal zombies or rotting Etruscan curse zombies?
The Map of Zombies will be a 24″x36″ poster (the same size as my H.P. Lovecraft’s Dreamlands poster map) that takes you on a tour of every imaginable type of zombie in a visual format. Drawn in the style of a vintage medical chart, it identifies over 350 different types of zombies from horror movies, books, video games, comics, manga and TV shows.
This map includes EVERY important (and almost every unimportant) zombie genre work, from Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar” to the movies of George Romero and Lucio Fulci, to Kengo Hanazawa’s “I Am a Hero.” Go from point to point on the map and discover the wide world of zombies, broken down by logical categories, like you were a scientist observing zombies in the field! Plus, discover at a glance whether a given book/movie/comic contains:
* Romantic Zombies
* Comedy Zombies
* Animal Zombies
* Nazi Zombies
* …and many more themes!
As a kid, I always loved reading reference books like The Visual Encyclopedia of Science Fiction and The Overlook Film Guide, where I could discover new, weird stuff I’d never heard of. Today, I’m just the same, but my biggest time sink is Wikipedia. From 2003 to 2005, I started the 250+ page zombie-themed webcomic The Stiff (currently re-running and continuing on my website). In 2007 I wrote the book Manga: The Complete Guide, the Eisner-nominated manga encyclopedia. In the past several years as a hobby, I’ve been doing for zombies what I did for manga: reading and watching every zombie movie, book and manga imaginable.
In short, (1) I love zombies and (2) I’m a detail person. Now, since I like drawing and there are too many zombie books already, I’m turning all that zombie information into a poster! My goal with The Map of Zombies is to create a great pseudo-vintage map which will show ALL the different horrific creatures who have gone by the word “zombie”.
My hope is that this poster will appeal to both diehard zombie fans and zombie newbies. This poster is for that person who’s never seen any zombie movies but likes “The Walking Dead”. This poster is for that person who insists “zombies must be like —–“, to blow their minds with the true rainbow of zombie diversity. The Map of Zombies is the ultimate zombie classification system. I hope you like it, and I hope we can make it possible together.
