A Long Day's Journey into HELL

FINALLY, precious dead things...it can be seen. The horror so foul, so staggeringly apocalyptic, that it was locked away, unseen by human eyes for 20 years. A tale of nihilistic, take-no-prisoners zombie perversion unlike any at the time...or today. Echoed by many late-comers in the ensuing decades, Arrow Comics' nightmarish splatter holocaust THE DEAD still has no equal...as you are about to see.

We present to you, for the first time ever, a taste of A Long Day's Journey into HELL, the lost, never-published third issue of The Dead, all the way from 1993.

The story up to this point has been a tragic one...two families (and a handful of friends) vacationing in the wilds of rural Michigan are set upon by a group of very bad people...very bad dead people.

 

An old, local farmer...with no pulse (but a double barrel shotgun to make up for it) drops in unexpectedly, and he's brought a few friends. The kind that draw flies.

The parents of both families are wiped out - tortured, massacred, eaten - the survivors, piled into a battered Winnebago headed for a fate unknown. But the dead do not stop...nothing gets between them and their prey. And they are not alone. They are everywhere.

And so our beleaguered group of survivors face danger and horror at every turn, until inevitably, one of them - pretty young Michelle - is bitten.

Unconscious, suffering massive blood loss, she dreams of the world to come...which is even worse than the one they have been ruthlessly thrust into. The one just outside their camper door...

 

While we work to upgrade the Dead blog to a full website, we'll be premiering the three-page teaser on the official Facebook page...

 

https://www.facebook.com/#!/ArrowComicsTheDead

 

...and our brand-bleedin'-new Flickr account.We highly recommend you subscribe.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/63073461@N07/sets/72157633262620973/

Believe us when we say, when this kicks into high gear, it's gonna be more fun then a girl scout meeting in a cemetery full of hungry zombies. We plan on dripping a little here, a little there into your drooling mouths as the weeks go on, to keep you hungry for what is to come...so stay tuned, necrophiliacs...it's about to get WET.

 

Don't forget your vomit bag...

Dreams of The Dead!

Alright, Dead Things...we have something special lined up for you, raised and ready to hit you in the face like a sledge hammer in 2013: DREAMS OF THE DEAD!

A bi-weekly webstrip brought to you by Fangoria Writer Mike Wasion and soon-to-be-superstar artist J. Paolo Yu-Asensi (he'll be stolen away by one of the Big Two within a year, just you watch!), DoTD ties directly into the coninuity of the DEAD comic - all three versions - and goes deeper into the hellish scenario unfolding therein.

17 year old Tina Summers is driving across the state of Michigan with her father to attend the funeral of her recently-departed mother. Things are bad. As bad things can be. Little does she realize, things are about to get a lot worse. Nodding off on the long drive up, Tina is wracked with horrific nightmares...bizarre images and scenarios that seemingly come out of nowhere, every time she shuts her eyes. What she doesn't know...what she could not possibly know...is that the "dreams" she cannot escape are about to become a reality she cannot run from!

DoTD plunges into the nightmarish 'behind-the-scenes' of the ongoing DEAD comic book, and exposes some of the demonic undepinnings of the apocalyptic scenario...Satanic entities, unnamable beasts, and unthinkable torments await Tina...and the reader. DoTD promises to usher in horrors yet unseen in the world of comics...levels of perversion that crawl deep into the mind...and stay there. Other titles take a scattershot approach to hardcore horror, and that's well and good...but DoTD hits you like a surgeon...a surgeon who knows just how to make you hurt. And badly.

So stay tuned...coming soon is an interview with J. Pao Yu-Asensi, along with a sneak peek at the ongoing DEAD comic book by Griffith, Kerr, and Crouch. You'll EAT IT UP!

We're BACK!

Greetings, Dead Things! What you have stumbled onto is the most putrid comic to ever infest the racks; a book so vile, it's been banned in Canada and the UK, a comic so unholy, it was featured on The 700 Club...the original...the foul...THE DEAD!

Long before The Walking Dead made ongoing, black and white zombie comics hip, long before Crossed shattered boundries and ravaged taboos, The Dead was planting corpses in the same fertile field. Created by Detroit natives Ralph Griffith and Stuart Kerr, groundwork for The Dead was laid waaay back in 1986. The concept was reworked, expanded, and ultimately grew into the insanely influencial Deadworld, which hit the stands in 1987 and took the indy comic scene by storm. Illustrated by a pre-Cannibal Corpse Vince Locke, it spilled blood and set trends, and as it's cult grew so did it's notoriety...but as the horrific comic was snowballing into a bonafied success, the indy comics crash obliterated the market, and Arrow Comics, Ralph & Stu's company, was pulled into the void. Deadworld was ultimately rescued by Gary Reed and his Caliber Comics imprint, where it lived on to cult success (proving a must-read, even to this day)...but never again would it be spearheaded by it's original creators, and never again would it have the feel it had in the early days. One could only wonder what the book might have been like had it stayed in Ralph & Stu's hands...as it turns out, one wouldn't have to wait very long to find out. 

In 1993 Arrow Comics rose from the grave, and the first title it published was The Dead...and it was very much a return to form for Griffith and Kerr, who took the core idea of Deadworld and brought it back to it's creative roots, and let it run wild. The horror and gore returned ten-fold, and the story took on truly hellish dimensions, with heretofore unseen levels of sadistic slaughter and harsh sexuality. It was a comic with a wickedly depraved gleam in it's eye, a giddy nightmare blend of wanton, oldschool carnage and high adventure. It was alternately campy and gritty...bottomlessly dark and sick, but undeniably fun and exciting at the same time. But, like before, troubles arose in the ever-unstable indy comics market, and Arrow closed it's doors once again.

An attempt was made to revive the title when Arrow crawled from the tomb in 1998, but the curse struck once more, and The Dead took another blow to the head. But this is truly a comic too dead to die...Ralph and Stu are at it again, and with psychotic up-and-comer Deidre Crouch (creator of the cult webstrip Putrid Meat) spilling the ink, the book is ready to shred more flesh than ever before. Currently offered as a semi-annual treat for hardcore, in-the-know fans, The Dead is poised to attack the mainstream yet again, just in time for it's 20th anniversary. In a world where the twisted antics it pioneered are taken for granted in a bevy of other titles, The Dead has no choice but to reclaim it's throne with extreme predjudice...by any means necessary.
 

 

So keep it here, Dead Things...get in on the ground floor, because 2013 is the year of THE DEAD!

And don't forget to follow us on Facebook...get INFECTED today! http://www.facebook.com/ArrowComicsTheDead