It’s been almost two years now since I began doing a series of writings on here about the times I sent letters to comics and they were printed. I posted one and then never posted about another.
There are reasons for that. There’s one I want to save for later in the series, and the one I specifically wanted to do next is in a comic I no longer own and can not find a scan of. So I was thinking “what other comics did I have letters in?” and the answer was “didn’t I get one into Walking Dead?”
Spoilers: the answer is I don’t think I did get one into the Walking Dead comic. I did WRITE a letter to Walking Dead, and I guess at some point my memory decided it had been printed, but having spent some time last year checking, I don’t think it ever actually was. But hey, I can still talk about it.
Zombies movies were one of my favourite kinds of horror movies as a kid. I enjoyed the Romero movies maybe while I was younger than I should have, and Return of the Living Dead was a truly formative experience for little PDR. By the late ’90s I felt that zombies were losing ground in the public consciousness, so when they made a huge return in the early 2000s I was elated. Things like 28 Days Later and Shaun of the Dead pleased PDR greatly. The Walking Dead comic was part of that resurgence of zombie media and, though I didn’t learn about it right away, when a friend told me of its existence a year or so in, I went back and became a loyal reader. On one occasion, I also wrote a letter (presumably be email at this point).
I must have been around 24 when this occurred. I don’t remember exactly what issue I was responding to, but I know it was the one that ended with two young girls being decapitated. The cast was trying to make a home in a prison and the two of them had gone off on their own to give each other haircuts, only to be found at the end of the issue dead. It was supposed to be a shock that they weren’t killed by zombies, but by a person who was probably still among the survivors! Uh oh!
The reason I remember that is that in my letter I made a joke about how they had messed up giving each other haircuts and decapitated each other by accident. Mildly amusing at best, but also the only thing I remember about the letter. I presume it was full of compliments. I doubt I had any questions. Asking questions would have felt like hassling them and I wouldn’t have wanted to hassle them.
Anyway, I continued reading Walking Dead for years after that, but never wrote again. Maybe I never wrote again because my first letter hadn’t been printed, but at some point I got it into my head that it HAD been printed, so it doesn’t seem likely that I actively avoided it for that reason. I think I just didn’t write again because it does feel like a hassle. It’s stupid, given that the letters pages are there for a reason, but it does take a surge of mental effort on my part to get over the idea that the creatives would rather not hear from me. It’s so much easier to just not try to connect, even if sometimes its a shame we don’t.
I still like zombies well enough, though they don’t light a fire in me the way they did when I was younger. I didn’t follow the Walking Dead television show for much beyond the first season, and I understand there are now a couple spinoffs which I’ve not seen at all. There are sequels to 28 Days Later and roughly a million zombie video games. Whatever fear I had that the genre was disappearing in the ’90s was simply incorrect. It’s here to stay. It’s here when I need it, which is only occasionally, but I’m still glad it’s there.
