robotnik2004 | The Zombie With No Name (Reply)

Are you the best crack team of culture vultures on the internet, or are you the best crack team of culture vultures on the internet? It takes a certain kind of person to answer a goofball query like "What was the first cowboy zombie?" with straight up answers like:

jeregenest: "I instantly think of Lucio Fulci's work in the late 1970s when it comes to westerns and zombies."

ratmmjess: "I could get a good article out of that, if I had the resources to investigate it thoroughly."

ivan23: "This, good sir, is a worthy quest for such as we."

Plus Chris T representing with his beloved super-apes, and Sean D stepping up to suggest EC Comics (of course!), and not one person even suggesting that this is a ridiculous question to ask, let alone get worked up about. I tell ya, the Planetary field team's got nothing on my Friends list.

Now, then. Chris' sick obsession with hot clockwork-on-corpse porn notwithstanding, he is right to remind us that there may be no single smoking zombie. The super-ape phenom is a good sister example of the sort of thing we're talking about: a visual trope that's practically a cliche within the subculture and practically unknown without. (Although, was the super-ape boom really in the 1960s? I would have guessed it was the early 1970s, ie post Planet Of The Apes. Which could then have provided the Ur-Super-Ape. Obviously intensive further study is in order. And funding for same. Quickly, to the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada!)

[Edit: Intensive further study has been completed, and Chris was right, I was wrong. The Ape Age of Comics apparently dates all the way back to the 1950s.]

"Hey, I heard we're going to Ape Island!"
"Yeah, to capture a giant ape. I wish we were going to Candy Apple Island instead."
"Candy Apple Island? What've they got there?"
"Apes. But they're not so big."

All that said, I'm certainly prepared to give the first horror western award to the mighty Robert Howard, especially on the double say so of Jess & Jere. (The other "Jess," and Jere, that is.) But my guess is we probably won't find many bona fide cowboy zombies in the 1930s pulps, because I don't think (but please do correct me if I'm wrong) the zombie qua zombie was really realized in pop culture until a few decades further along. When Val Lewton made I Walked With A Zombie in 1942, to most people "zombie" still meant "doped up Haitian" rather than "brain eating corpse." I think.

Sean might just win the cookie for his suggestion of pre-Frederick Wertham EC Comics. Not as the originator of the horror western, surely, but as a key vector that burned the image of the cowboy zombie—the dessicated corpse, the snaggly teeth, the tattered Confederate uniform—into the soft little brain tissue of the baby boom kiddies who grew up to seed it all over our culture.

Say, that reminds me. There's a cowboy zombie story in the McSweeney's / Michael Chabon Treasury of Thrilling Tales by none other than Sherman Alexie. It's as nasty and moralistic as any of the EC Cryptkeeper's yarns, and simultaneously one of the most straight-up genre pieces and one of the most memorable stories in that oddball collection.