Some people think Zombie Kisses is about gore & physical violence. I have done my best to avoid the gore & violence as much as possible while still telling the story. I don’t describe every single murder or act of self-defense in graphic detail & the times that I do are meant to keep the storyline from becoming too glamorous & overly romantic rather than to titillate.
One of the things Zombie Kisses is about is the idea that mere survival is a source of hope & inspiration. Everyone I know seems to be going through their own personal apocalypses & some people get quite broken by them & other just slightly damaged. Keeping from becoming a self-centered jerk in the face of such things is very difficult & my brother’s ability to do this is admirable. Not just physical survival but a survival of good character & morality is something we all should be after. The survival of this morality & of family values is a major point, & probably the major point, of the series.
I guess what Zombie Kisses is about stylistically is combining a post-modern emotionally-driven writing style with the things I’ve always found so interesting with the episodic nature of comic books & television. How in a way nothing ever happens, unless you miss a part & then it doesn’t make sense. It’s also an attempt to write in an omni-present style reminiscent of cinema & especially westerns.
Why the apocalypse
instead of daily life? Well, I grew up at a special time where I
was watching movies like Dawn of the Dead & Threads
& The Day After & Warlords of the 21st Century
& Deathrace 2000 in elementary school. I remember
a conversation with my friend William in the third grade where we were
talking about the year 2000 & factually saying that nuclear war would
come before that. So I wasn’t the only one like that & it’s all
deep inside my subconscious trying to break free. As far as it being
zombies instead of some other apocalypse, I guess in a way the survival
of zombies is a little happier & took less research than nuclear war.