By Harry Markov
Sachetto, Rob; Walsh, Jeremy. Zombiewood Weekly: The Celebrity Dead Exposed. Ulysses Press (August 17, 2010). 64 pp. $24.95 USD. ISBN-13: 978-1569757802.
At 64 pages and more than 100 portraits, and with no storyline whatsoever, Zombiewood Weekly: The Celebrity Dead Exposed is a whole new beast. Written as a magazine parody, Zombiewood Weekly harvests the world’s top trending topics: celebrities and zombies, delivering a product made of awesome but never meant for the squeamish.
Zombiewood Weekly: The Celebrity Dead Exposed, as a product, is flawless. Ulysses Press has an eye for detail and this pretty little thing deceives. It feels like a regular celebrity magazine. It has the flashy titles, trademark wordplay and glossy paper, and it’s the size you’d expect a gossip rag to be. To me, the magazine’s been put together to showcase Rob Sachetto’s art. His portraits build what I call ‘The Anatomy of Death’. His resume claims to have done around a thousand of these gory portraits and his skill shows. Celebrities are more than green around the gills, when decay finally sets in. Forget about those cute dimples and blemishes; envision flesh wounds and strips of peeled-off epidermis. Celebrities that craved the next extreme look now can choose between exposed jaws, missing cheeks and hives of blisters and bruises. Puss flows freely, while brains droop miserably from untreated head traumas. It’s all drawn as believable as possible, giving even me some queasy moments.
The portraits alone are impressive, but what makes them pop out even more are the gossipy bits that writer Jeremy Walsh sprinkles on every page. No longer than annotations, they add much-needed context to make the grotesque funny and haven’t celebrities always given us material to laugh, head-shake or tisk at? It’s obvious that Zombiewood Weekly parodies the Hollywood constellations of stars – not so much the stars, per se (as some celebrities have become parodies on their own), but the importance we attribute to their lives. The magazine’s celebrity list gives opportunity to breeze through all the recent scandals (Tiger Woods and Sandra Bullock’s messy divorce) to the stars that have been the butt of the joke for quite some time (Madonna, because, well, she is Madonna; budding and rebellious Miley Cyrus) to film reboots and sequels (Matt Damon and his re-Bourne) to carriers brought back to life (Cindy Lauper and Golden Hollywood stars).
While headlines like ‘Heartthrob without a Heartbeat’, ‘Carrier Rises from the Grave’ and ‘Cross-Cultural Contamination’ may make you snicker, Zombiewood Weekly mocks our obsession with stars. Don’t we all crave to see how Brangelina will crumble and that Brad will get dumped as karma for leaving Aniston? Don’t we all want to see Justin Bieber get hit by another bottle on the head? We keep up with celebrities because we want to see thunder in paradise (at least, I do, but I’m evil, so I may be an exception) and in the process, we become transfixed. You so want more and more and you consume any news without ever having that hunger sated, just like a zombie. This magazine takes this obsession to new levels, where celebrities don’t have a bit of peace, when they should be resting in peace. In a way, this magazine is parodying the readers as well for picking it up in the first place.
It’s clever. It’s gross. It shows talent and attitude. Zombiewood does not take itself seriously, but it doesn’t take its readers seriously, either, even laughing at their nosiness. Simply brilliant.
Harry Markov: Priest of the Elder Gods of Weirdness, bookaholic, novelist and freelance writer. Follow him on Twitter at @harrymarkov.
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