Canada Finally Gets a Starring Role in a Zombie Game

The Walking Dead has taken audiences from the woods of Georgia to the suburbs of D.C. Shawn of the Dead and 28 Days Later imagined an overrun London. Even Norway got the spotlight with its Nazi-zombie horror-comedy classic Dead Snow.

But Canada has been left out of a global phenomenon spanning movies, TV shows, comic books, novels, and video games. (Arguably I could make this point about everything, but let's stick to zombies for this article, eh.)

Perhaps the winters make our flesh into an unpleasant popsicle-like texture that zombies don't care for or they just hate hockey or something. Whatever the reason, we have been largely ignored in the oeuvre (although, there was a brief mention in the seminal zombie novel World War Z of American refugees attempting to find refuge in Canada, a bad idea that ultimately led to Franklin Expedition levels of cannibalism.)

But an independent comic book series and video game is trying to change that.

Z'Isle, which is both made and set in Montreal, takes a less well-travelled route to telling a post-apocalyptic tale. In the five issues published thus far, there has been no exposition-heavy origin story: it begins years after humanity was decimated in a war with the dead (another four issues are planned for the first volume, with two other volumes to follow over the next few years). Now, it's time for various factions to rebuild Canada's second largest city while fighting what's left of the zombie hordes and each other. (I didn't say it was an entirely original plot.)

Montreal native Lateef Martin is a bit of a nerd renaissance man. A zombie fanatic, cosplayer, voice actor and now, video game and comic book writer, illustrator and art director, he is the founder of Miscellaneum Studios, the company behind Z'Isle. He said the decision to make Montreal the setting for a zombie comic was just a matter of thinking analytically.

"What's the safest you can possibly be at during a zombie apocalypse?" he told VICE. "We figured a deserted island."

It's a tough time to get started in zombie lore since the gold standard has already been set. World War Z, which Martin admits was a key inspiration, was so thoroughly researched that author Max Brooks has become a non-resident fellow at the Modern War Institute, lecturing on how thinking through seemingly insanely problems can be a useful mental exercise. Any attempt at building a fictional universe around zombies now must compete with that depth of thought. The Z'Isle comic reaches for that level of consistency, building an internal logic based on the city's unique geography, architecture and demographics. Montreal's signature stylistic flourishes, like spiral staircases, abound and landmarks appear in both the foreground and background: a soldier training camp built out of the remains of La Ronde, the rusted-out wreck of the Jacques Cartier Bridge, the toppled over remnants of the Mount Royal cross.

More importantly, the book's survivors are based around Montreal's multicultural ethnic makeup—there are ample characters of colour present, although race has yet to be overtly discussed in the series. (Many of the city's fictional inhabitants are actually real people—donors to a 2013 crowdsourcing effort were able to get themselves incorporated into the series. A wall of Martin's home studio is lined with dozens of profiles of individuals who will be incorporated, an area that Martin cheerily refers to as "The Wall of Death"). While the racial politics of horror could be analyzed for hours, the sad truth is, it can be summed up in one trope: The black guy dies first. Z'Isle is a conscious repudiation of that stereotype. Though racial politics have yet to play into any of the first five issues, it's an issue that lingers at the margins.

"I was tired of the black guy getting killed," said Martin, launching into a list of underdeveloped black characters who have been eaten or beaten to death on the television version of The Walking Dead.

"Our company is about representing people of colour, women, the LGBTQ community and other marginalized communities," he added. "Let's face it, there's a lot of stereotypes in media, it's ridiculous. We want to make sure we can counter that to the best of our ability without beating people over the head."

The fact that just having numerous characters who are black or gay is somewhat revolutionary is a depressing indictment of where TWD has taken the zombie genre. While there are ample zombie flicks that are cheesy fun, zombies have their roots in social commentary: many have read George Romero's Night of the Living Dead, the granddaddy of zombie films, as a critique of American racism. His follow-ups Dawn of the Dead and Land of the Dead took on commercialism and capitalism, respectively, while Danny Boyle's 28 Days Later tackled everything from environmentalists' arrogance to unbridled militarism. While TWD the show has devolved into main character death fakeouts and CORAL! memes, Z'Isle is returning zombies to their origins as flexible symbols.

"Feeders represent bias in our story," said Martin. "Originally, zombies represented the threat of other. People of colour, black people, that was the origin. These things are coming after you… It's not something that's so much in the story, it's just what is, in the sense that we all grow up with bias. As a result, unless we engage in critical thought, we think about certain people in a certain way… We're all infected with it and if you don't change the way you think, you're stuck with this one way of thinking and that's what zombies are."

Intellectual themes aside, nobody would read zombie comics if there wasn't an ample amount of blood and guts. Here is where Z'Isle does falter a bit—the first five issues contain a kill here or there but much of the running time is spent setting up a gigantic cast of characters and factions doing mundane things like giving dental checkups, growing broccoli and building water purifiers.

Martin said there is another four issues planned for the first volume with another two shorter volumes to follow over the next few years. Over those first five issues, that methodical pacing does have advantages. Examining the art work, little details emerge that show how well thought out this world is.

Take guns, for example: it's almost taken for granted that any zombie-slayer worth his salt will end up armed to the teeth eventually. But with Quebec's low rate of gun ownership (at least compared to the United States—there are just under 500,000 gun licenses issued in the province as of Dec. 2014), it would make little sense to have a bunch of French-Canadian Rambos running around.

Instead, Martin and company looked for the things that there are ample of on the island: hence, weapons scavenged from the corpses of thousands of bicycles.

"After seven years, the bullets run out but you've got a lot of bikes. So, bikes became the most readily resource to make weapons," said Martin. "No one's done cycle-punk before." A video game, which is planned for a release on Steam followed by PS4 and XBox One in 2018, is a chance to expand that universe—other than a flashback showing the collapse of one of Montreal's most iconic landmarks, little is shown of the apocalypse's onset in the comic. The game will take place during those initial days in the form of a turn-based RPG. Players will complete missions while building their communities, all while fighting off the hordes and a recent ex with whom you have survived.

Miscellaneum has launched a Kickstarter to help with development which will run until October 15.

Like the comic book, there are big themes at play—what it means to form communities and why that so often goes awry. You don't need zombies to set people at each other's throats—just look at Ferguson or Syria or any of a billion other conflicts through human history. Tear your eyes away from the throat ripping in a zombie movie or show or game or comic book and you might realize David Bowie and John McCrae got it right: We are the dead. "It's about the human experience," said Martin. "At the end of the day, you look at a zombie story going what is it about? It's not about the zombies, because that's white noise, it's a threat, it could be anything. It could be a pancake with wings. It's about reconnecting and trying to trust each other again."