Just in case you want in on the awesome, and you want to celebrate Christmas in an unconventional way, check out Marvel Comics’ adaptation of A Christmas Carol—with zombies!
Zombies Christmas Carol, published in September, might at first blush seem like yet another adaptation of a classic tale with zombies thrown in, a trend kicked off a couple years ago by Seth Grahame-Smith’s Pride & Prejudice & Zombies. Zombies Christmas Carol seems particularly well-suited to the zombie treatment, though, and not just because the story is already filled with supernatural creatures.
Eisner Award-winner Jim McCann (author of Return of the Dapper Men) adapts the Charles Dickens tale with a deft hand, making it his own while still maintaining surprising fidelity to the original. In the adaptation, Scrooge must not just give to the poor—he’s the only one with the financial means to stave off “the hungry death” that threatens to burst out of the poorhouses and hospitals.
“And so with Scrooge laying as mankind’s last hope,” McCann writes, “Humanity might as well have extinguished its final fires this very Christmas Eve.”
Zombies Christmas Carol features the art teams of David Baldeon & Jordi Tarragona and Jeremy Treece & Roger Bonet. Their art styles mesh well enough, particularly since Baldeon & Tarragona handle everything set in the present, which anchors the story. Flashbacks and flashforwards to the past and future fall under Treece & Bonet’s domain, accentuating the differences in timeline at convenient points.
Marvel Comics has made a cottage industry of zombies, putting the zombie spin on most of its main characters in its Marvel Zombies series. The comic publisher has also had excellent success adapting classics through its Marvel Illustrated line. That the two ventures would somehow intersect—collide?—shouldn’t surprise me. That the result was so good shouldn’t, either.
Zombies Christmas Carol turns out to be delicious fun and way cool.
