When I sink my teeth into a zombie story, the most easily available starting point is the narrative of THE OTHER. Our innate fear of the unknown variables in other people. Zombies are beacons of fear toward people who aren’t like you and signifiers of the breakdown of societal norms and structures, as people have come to know. But the metaphor has grown and changed from the first instance of the zombie as we know it today in White Zombie (1932) or Night of the Living Dead (1968), so I try not to let those familiar themes consume my disection of every story I devour. But I would be lying if I said that it isn’t how I started Deniz Camp and Stipan Morian’s Bleeding Hearts #1.
But as I sank my fingers into the flesh of what Bleeding Hearts was, I found that theme beating at the very center of it all, but in a very different way. While so many stories use the zombie as the sinister other, Bleeding Hearts pulled open its ribcage to show me the truth. It’s a story about us. A story about a society that feels like it’s beyond its fall and destruction. But in that place of the undead, there is still hope. There are still things keeping pockets of community held together.
Bleeding Hearts #1 follows a zombie named Poke. Poke is in a pinch because he has something that zombies just plain aren’t supposed to have. And that thing is a beating heart.
Zombies in this story aren’t just mindless undead who chomp on the living, but they do still eat people, so don’t jump ship just yet. They are capable of communication between each other. Poke has connections to other zombies that aren’t normal for what monsters normally have. These zombies build friendships that can last a long time or even a short while because connections in the story and in modern life are fleeting. Community and customs rise up in the horde as they do in every other polite society. Except this society isn’t so polite and loves eating living flesh.
The world has changed on and off the page. In the age of instant connection, people come and go as they are replaced by new people who come through so many forms of community that have risen. We aren’t beholden to a nuclear family and our direct community as we once were in many ways. In the past, people may have had the same social group from birth until death. But now, you can form bonds through the World Wide Web all over the planet. The community is limitless, and you, too, can find your own horde like Poke has.
Bleeding Hearts makes a point of showing “culture grows around carcasses”. It’s not just through the dialogue but through Stipan Morian and Matt Hollingsworth’s art. Every zombie in the issue has a unique look. Many of their looks even show how they became undead. As the book describes the textures and flavors of the complicated human heart, we see how vast the sea of the undead is in its own larger-than-life design. It’s a book that allows style to overflow from the pages, with characters who flow and move together in a vast unrest of being undead. There is pain, emotion, and so many of the feelings of who we have become as people today packed into the story that it’s bursting at the seams.
There are two pages that brought this idea of THE SELF to mind, rather than exploring THE OTHER. On one page, Poke sees and describes a fellow zombie who is just a bottom half as “such a positive half person”. He describes how his foot movements and motions reflect his hope for the future… despite only being a bottom half. I don’t think I need to explain to you why the world feels so bleak right now, but so many of us are struggling with something that it’s always beautiful to meet someone who is also struggling that still has sunshine on their, uh, hips?
The page right after is something entirely different. In a world of monsters, they are still ostracized for one mistake. They allow a zombie to be defined for the rest of his life by the worst thing he’s ever done. Poke says we all make mistakes, but what then? What comes after that? It’s a very real look at what so many deal with today. Does one mistake make a monster a monster forever?
Bleeding Hearts is a triumphant start to a comic that deserves conversation, dialogue, and analysis. Hassan Otsmane-Elhaou’s constant lettering of the beating of Poke’s heart keeps the thread of mystery alive with beauty in the issue, while we are introduced to a culture of the undead so close to our own. When you come out on the other side of many zombie stories, you realize THE OTHER is just you in the end, but in Bleeding Hearts, it’s you from page one.