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Comic Strip of the Day

CSotD: Occupy Transylvania

Published: October 13, 2011 1 minute 8 comments

Strange brew

Today's Strange Brew make me laugh without provoking any great diatribe except that I'm really, really tired of zombies. Which I've already said, and yet they don't stop.

This is a good example of re-purposing a creaky premise. Vampires and blood banks have certainly met on the funny pages before, but in the current hard times, given the ubiquity of the zombie craze and given the time of year, I don't mind that I've seen Dracula in a blood bank before, and, besides, I don't think I've seen him rob one. Generally, he's just there to make a withdrawal.

The idea that Dracula, a rich guy with a castle and a tux, has fallen on hard times is pretty amusing to begin with. Add the reason why and you've got a good cartoon.

Which goes to show that you should never reject a premise strictly on the basis that you've seen a variation on it before.

Unless it's about zombies and then you should walk the dog or go get the mail or do some dishes or whatever it is you do to clear your head of really cheesy ideas so you can come up with something else. Anything else. Please.

Better you should draw a cartoon of two guys fishing and they're facing different directions and one of them is being swallowed by a giant fish and is struggling, while the other one is completely oblivious to this and is calmly saying, "Just be grateful you're not stuck in a cartoon about zombies."

Which would be, like, so meta.

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Comments 8

  1. I have a good friend who loves zombies, writes about them, even. I’ve never gotten the appeal, but I do applaud her efforts, if that’s what floats her boat. Their ubiquity doesn’t really bother me, I just stay far away from them. (Except, unexpectedly, in the ghostly car ad I linked to on my Facebook page. I am REALLY sorry about your mother. I meant to warn her.)
    However, I’ve always been fond of Dracula. I blame it on ‘Nosferatu’, which brought pathos to the character. Ordinary vampires in general, and the sparkly ones in particular, I also tend to avoid.
    ‘True Blood’ is another story entirely.

  2. Mike, have you seen Shaun of the Dead?

  3. I liked “Pride and Prejudice and Zombies” but not beyond thinking it would have been a good piece back when National Lampoon was funny. (Yes, I’m THAT old!) But it has morphed into a graphic novel, a book, a series of follow-ups … it’s like the Coneheads on Saturday Night Live. Hilarious once, funny twice and then … come on, what else you got??

  4. I’ve seen that it’s around, Mark, but kind of shied away because it’s so hard to parody something that was never really intended to be taken seriously in the first place, y’know? I could be wrong. But I couldn’t get into Rocky Horror for basically that reason.

  5. I think you’d find it more interesting than that. (Hot Fuzz, by the same team, is also pretty funny.)

  6. Plus I don’t think “Shaun of the Dead” is intended to be a parody. Like “Hot Fuzz” it’s more a dramedy. Take a tired premise, twist it and add humor.

  8. The comic strip is not bad — you need to tighten the writing, but that comes with time. But that link brought me to August 4, 2010 and for a minute I thought you’d ended the strip.

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