Too late to save this one.

Rick receives a phone call that changes his life.

This book explores the connections between comics and Gothic from four different angles: historical, formal, cultural and textual. It identifies structures, styles and themes drawn from literary gothic traditions and discusses their presence in British and American comics today, with particular attention to the DC Vertigo imprint. Part One offers an historical approach to British and American comics and Gothic, summarizing the development of both their creative content and critical models, and discussing censorship, allusion and self-awareness. Part Two brings together some of the gothic narrative strategies of comics and reinterprets critical approaches to the comics medium, arguing for an holistic model based around the symbols of the crypt, the spectre and the archive. Part Three then combines cultural and textual analysis, discussing the communities that have built up around comics and gothic artifacts and concluding with case studies of two of the most famous gothic archetypes in comics: the vampire and the zombie.

More classic tales from the original Warren era Vampirella series! Zombie corpses howl for human flesh!

An accessible introduction to the world of The Walking Dead, this book looks across platforms and analytical frameworks to characterize the fictional world of The Walking Dead and how its audiences make use of it. From comics and television to social media, apps, and mobile games, utilizing concepts derived from literary studies, media studies, history, anthropology, and religious studies, Matthew Freeman examines the functions and affordances of new digital platforms. In doing so, he establishes a new transdisciplinary framework for analyzing imaginary worlds across multiple media platforms, bolstering the critical arena of world-building studies by providing a greater array of vocabulary, concepts, and approaches. The World of The Walking Dead is an engaging exploration of stories, their platforms, and their reception, ideal for students and scholars of world-building, film and TV studies, new media, and everything in-between.

This book presents essays and scientific contributions examining the link between popular media and politics. The essays focus on the question of how political and social change, concepts of power, and utopian elements are reflected in selected films and television series. The book applies a political science perspective, covering theories from political philosophy, political sociology and international relations, and examines a wide range of movies and TV series, such as The Godfather, Fight Club, The Walking Dead and Game of Thrones. It will appeal to anyone interested in studying how political ideas, concepts and messages can be illustrated and visualized using the complex media of movies and TV series.

How international relations theory can be applied to a zombie invasion What would happen to international politics if the dead rose from the grave and started to eat the living? Daniel Drezner’s groundbreaking book answers the question that other international relations scholars have been too scared to ask. Addressing timely issues with analytical bite, Drezner looks at how well-known theories from international relations might be applied to a war with zombies. Exploring the plots of popular zombie films, songs, and books, Theories of International Politics and Zombies predicts realistic scenarios for the political stage in the face of a zombie threat and considers how valid—or how rotten—such scenarios might be. With worldwide calamity feeling ever closer, this new apocalyptic edition includes updates throughout as well as a new chapter on postcolonial perspectives.

In this riveting, “gory, and action-packed” (Jonathan Maberry) survival thriller, set in the expansive world of Robert Kirkman’s The Walking Dead series, three people from different walks of life in China must join forces against the typhoon of undead as chaos sweeps over Asia. In the aftermath of the zombie virus outbreak, what remains of the Chinese government has estimated that one billion walkers (called jiangshi) are currently roaming through the country. Across this dramatic landscape, large groups of survivors have clustered together for safety in villages and towns that have been built vertically as a means of protection against the unceasing wave of jiangshi. Before this devastation, Zhu was one of the millions of poor farmers who left their rural roots for the promise of consistent employment in one of China’s booming factory towns. Elena was an American teaching English in China while on a gap year before beginning law school. Hengyen was a grizzled military officer of some renown, and a passionate believer in his nation’s ability to surmount any obstacle. But with the settlement’s 3,000 mouths to feed and the scavengers having to travel further and further in search of food, Zhu ends up at his home village, where he is shocked to find survivors. Does he force them to join the settlement or keep their existence a secret? Meanwhile, Hengyen is tasked with the impossible: fortifying the Beacon against a 100,000-strong “typhoon” of walkers header their way. Even though he realizes that the Beacon hardly stands a chance, Hengyen is a believer and will stand with his compatriots to the very last, bringing him into conflict with Zhu, who intends to flee the path of the typhoon and make for the safety of China’s dramatic mountain ranges before it’s too late. Given “two decaying thumbs up,” (Jonathan Mayberry, author of Rot & Ruin), this book is sure to get your heart racing and leave you wanting more!

This volume investigates interdisciplinary intersections between law and the humanities from the Renaissance to the present day. It allows for fruitful encounters between different disciplines: from literature to science, from the visual arts to the post-human, from the postmodern novel’s experimentation to most recent approaches towards the legal interpretation of literary texts. This productive dialogue fosters original perspectives in the interpretation of and reflection upon identity, justice, power and human rights and values, thus underlining the role of literature in the articulation of relevant cultural issues pertaining to specific periods.

Funerary rituals and the cult of the dead are classics of research in religious studies, especially for ancient Egypt. Still, we know relatively little about how people interacted in daily life at the city of Memphis and its Saqqara necropolis in the late second millennium BCE. By focussing on lived ancient religion, we can see that the social and religious strategies employed by the individuals at Saqqara are not just means on the way to religious, post-mortem salvation, nor is their self-representation simply intended to manifest social status. On the contrary, the religious practices at Saqqara show in their complex spatiality a wide spectrum of options to configure sociality before and after one's own death. The analytical distinction between religion and other forms of human practices and sociality illuminates the range of cultural practices and how people selected, modified, or even avoided certain religious practices. As a result, pre-funerary, funerary and practices of the subsequent mortuary cults, in close connection with religious practices directed towards other ancestors and deities, allow the formation of imagined and functioning reminiscence clusters as central social groups at Saqqara, creating a heuristic model applicable also to other contexts.