 by
Benjamin Ong Pang Kean
If you thought Cleo had it rough in Ross Campbell’s Wet Moon,
wait untill you read The Abandoned, a black and white “and
zombie gore red” Original English Language (OEL) manga debuting
from TOKYOPOP in March 2006.
The Abandoned takes place in and around Savannah, Georgia, and follows a small group of young adults. “It centers
on Rylie, who’s just recently convinced
her crush, Naomi, to move into town,” Campbell began. “Rylie
plans to put the moves on Naomi, despite Naomi’s weakened emotional
state after losing both parents to a freak dump truck accident.
Rylie volunteers at a nursing home, and
is trapped inside the night of a big hurricane. Then everyone aged
23 and older dies, and quickly returns as the flesh-craving living
dead. After escaping a horde of undead senior citizens lusting after
her young flesh, Rylie heads out to find
Naomi and her friends. The rest of the story is Rylie
and the gang mostly getting to know each other, making food raids
on the local supermarket, and coming to realize the zombie thing
isn’t going away.
“Rylie is the central heroine: bighearted
volunteer worker by day, unruly deathrocker
by night. She’s friendly, cheerful and confident, and quite socially
aggressive, and has few qualms about taking advantage of people,
even if she doesn’t always mean to. She remains largely warm-hearted
and optimistic, though, and she spends a great deal of her time
with old folks at the local nursing home where she volunteers. Rylie
crushes on people regularly and is surprisingly romantic, and will
stop at nothing to get with the object of her desires.
  
“Naomi is soft-spoken and hesitant, and after her parents’
deaths under the wheels of a dump truck, she’s been even more detached
and unsure. She’s impressionable, and is often easily coaxed into
doing things (making her very susceptible to Rylie’s
gregariousness). As romance goes, Naomi’s love life has been consistently
fraught with problems, and despite her young age, she has dumped
many girlfriends.”
The rest of the gang include: “Ben: Ben is unlucky in most areas
of life, and is always berating himself for his many failures. He’s
been burned by both romance and family, and he also gets fired from
jobs a lot. Ben is fickle and flighty, and lives his life by his
heart, so his decisions are never rational or logical. And like
Naomi, Ben is also the perpetrator of many dumpings: except he prefers the dastardly method of doing
them over the telephone.
“Mae: A toughened, foul-mouthed orphan, Mae was forced to grow up
early on in life. Her tolerance for others is low, and she is cynical
and blunt, and takes no shit from anyone. She has few morals, and
also doesn’t care what anyone else does as long as they’re not her
way. Mae will protect bullied or mistreated children, using her
deadly fists as lessons to the perpetrators, although this attitude
only goes so far, as Mae dislikes the company of kids.
  
“Nicole: Nicole’s father was killed in the same dump
truck accident as Naomi’s parents. Nicole is positive and determined,
and now single-handedly runs the ice cream shop that her father
left to she and her sister (Cammie).
She flunked out of high school, so she’s had much experience in
the working world, and despite her consistently dull wit, she is
a capable worker. She’s a simple girl, and laughs at her own airhead
status, and is rarely annoyed or upset by anything.
“Cammie: Nicole’s quiet, emotionally-challenged
younger sister. She keeps most of her feelings inside, though, and
rarely shows any sort of hint that she’s upset. Her emotions are
ups and downs, going from bubbly and smiley to tight-lipped and
sulking in a second. After her father’s death, she didn’t speak
for two months, and is still extremely quiet, and only really opens
her mouth if she’s comfortable enough with the people around her.”
Campbell’s first published work was for White Wolf Publishing's
Exalted RPG books. His first comic work appeared in Oni Press’
Too Much Hopeless Savages and from there,
he illustrated and lettered Volume 1 of Antony
Johnston’s Spooked, also from Oni. His first solo creation
where he wrote and drew was released from the same publisher in
January 2005 in the form of Wet Moon Book 1: Feeble Wanderings.
Cambell’s “road to comics” has something
to do with his love of a certain imaginative six-year-old boy and
his stuffed tiger conceived by Bill Watterson,
and several anthropomorphic turtles created by Kevin Eastman and
Peter Laird. “Calvin & Hobbes and the old black and white
underground pre-cartoon Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles comics
of the 80s were both huge influences on me when I was young, and
I credit their creators with showing me the road to comics, both
conceptually and artistically. I was really into manga for a couple
years, but not much anymore (save for Blade of the Immortal
and a couple other titles here and there), and that definitely influenced
my work back in its “Japanese phase.”
His other favorites include Sam Kieth’s
The Maxx, Scott Pilgrim, Teratoid
Heights, Adrian Tomine’s Optic
Nerve comics, DEMO, Charles Burns’ Black Hole,
Usagi Yojimbo,
Peter Milligan and Mike Allred’s X-Force/X-Statix,
Grant Morrison’s New X-Men and We3 and he’s very much
looking forward to Becky Cloonan’s OEL
manga creation for TOKYOPOP, East Coast Rising.
  
At the same time, he confessed that he is also a big
horror fan. “I’m really into good zombie movies, especially George
Romero’s Living Dead series (Night of the Living Dead,
Dawn of the Dead, Day of the Dead, and Land of
the Dead), and Lucio Fulci’s
Zombie. I’ve always wanted to do a zombie book, and when
TOKYOPOP’s offer came about, I took the opportunity to do
so. I knew I wanted to amp up the hick-trash-gothabilly
look from my other series Wet Moon, and so The Abandoned’s characters were born pretty quickly.”
With The Abandoned, he just wants to do a good zombie story.
“The zombies are your typical walking corpses, so there’s not much
new there, but I think I’ve done them with my own hand, so they’ll
definitely be different in that respect. The zombie-hack-n-slash
thing seems to be done a lot in comics, especially with hot girls
thrown in, so I want this book to be something else. While it does
have hot girls, I think they’re different, and the book isn’t about
killing zombies. Yeah, I want it to be a zombie story that’s not
about killing zombies.
“I also have a few other ideas for comics I’d like to do but I don’t
know if I’ll have the time right now. Hopefully five years from
now, I’ll be doing Volume 7 of Wet Moon, and a giant monster
comic I’m tooling around with in my head. Or maybe a book about
mystic warrior monks, if I can find a publisher who does full color
and is willing to publish something without dialogue...”
Read the first chapter of The Abandoned at TOKYOPOP’s
Manga
Online mini-site
Ross Campbell’s website is located at www.greenoblivion.com
Looking
for more on OEL and Tokyopop?
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ESTEP: QUEEN OF THE ROADSONG
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OEL I: THE DREAMING BY QUEENIE CHAN
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TRICK
OR THREAT: GIFFEN & ROMAN ON I LUV HALLOWEEN
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JEN
QUICK ON TOKYOPOP'S OFF*BEAT
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& HILDEBRANDT ON TOKYOPOP'S WAR ON FLESH
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RISING STARS X: WES ABBOTT ON DOGBY WALKS
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RISING STARS VI: CHRISTY LIJEWSKI ON
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RISING STARS V: LINDSAY CIBOS ON PEACH FUZZ
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RISING STARS IV: AMY KIM GANTER ON
SORCERERS & SECRETARIES
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RISING STARS III: M. ALICE LeGROW ON
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RISING STARS II: FELIPE SMITH ON MBQ
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RISING STARS I: JESS STONCIUS ON WORK BITES
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