MYTHCOMICS: "CORPSES, COAST TO COAST" (VOODOO #14, 1954)

Like the 1951 story "Crawling Evil," "Corpses-- Coast to Coast" is a story credited only to "the Iger Shop" on the Grand Comics Database. Within the realm of comic books, "Corpses" is a rare zombie-story in which no literal zombies appear, since the whole thing is a dream. And the whole story is also celebrated by a few online sites as a weird fever-dream. However, in contrast to most of the dim-witted attacks on Communism seen in comic books, "Corpses" is also a clever spoof of the movement, particularly its history at organizing labor unions in the United States.

First, here's one of the sigils designed for the 1905 association "Industrial Workers of the World," a.k.a. "the Wobblies:"

And here's the first page of "Corpses," which also presents a three-letter sigil for the world's new conquerors, the United World Zombies.

The narrator of the dream, identified in the narrative as "Z-One," is focused on just one highly improbable form of striking labor: that of grave diggers. Z-One, although he claims that he's an undertaker by trade, is actually one of the men responsible for the strike. Instead of being concerned that his establishment is being filled up with unburied corpses, he and his confederates simply make the cadavers "the raw material of one of the greatest revolutions ever planned."

The dead bodies-- including females as well as males-- are then "reactivated" at a special plant and sent out to conquer America. Not surprisingly, zombies sound a lot like the 1950s idea of doctrinaire Stalinists. "No fear, no minds," says Z-One's superior (getting the order of things somewhat backward), as he reminisces about some "old days" to which the reader is not privy (but may well go back to 1905 and those other unionizing efforts).

In no time, and with no real sign of warfare, the zombies take over the world, and invite all "non-zombies" to either "become zombies or die."On page 5 Z-One explains that there are some jobs that "regular zombies"-- presumably the ones that died and deteriorated somewhat-- can't do as well as can living people who are transformed into "synthetic zombies."

However, Z-One admits that even world conquest can have its down side, for "it seems that zombies can be just as stupid as so-called people!" For reasons that the dream does not explain, one faction of zombies attacks the government of "Big Z" with nuclear weapons, and even the leader himself perishes. Z-One ascends to power, hoping to "make the world safe for zombiocracy." There the dream ends, and the tale-teller delivers one last loony revelation to his listeners-- though, since there's no evidence for it in the story proper, I tend to disregard it as a lame joke.

In some ways this is a pretty even-handed spoof, since Z-One is also taking stabs at particular phrases associated with American hegemony ("making the world safe for democracy") or even the capitalistic ideal of slave-workers ("They work 24 hours a day, and never need any rest.") But what most makes me consider the story mythic is the idea of human cadavers being transformed into zombie laborers, simply because the grave-diggers are striking and thus leaving the country open to the reign of the dead.

The whole story appears on Comic Book Plus.