You know, I get a surprisingly small amount of hate mail for this comic. Almost nothing really. Which is surprising as I truly truly enjoy saying jackassy things and given the nature of the internet you would think I’d pay for it.

So I was surprised last week to find myself in a flame war of sorts with a troll on reddit. A “delightful” fellow took exception to me drawing the Avengers as zombies for my son as it had already been done in Marvel Zombies. And since I wasn’t trying to copy Marvel Zombies and he was a bit of a douche I may have risen to the bait and said some unflattering things about his parentage and how his living arrangements in his mother’s basement…. was not ideal.

I “may” have said these things.

So lets talk about originality for a second, how it is almost none existent, and how that’s okay.

Here’s an exercise. Let’s think up an idea together. Go ahead, think of anything.

Have you got something? Awesome!…. also TOO BAD, BECAUSE SOMEONE ELSE ALREADY HAD THAT IDEA AND BEAT YOU TOO IT! FAILURE!!! YOU HAVE FAILED, SIR!

That seams harsh doesn’t it? Thankfully we live in a world where we’re each free to dust off any tired old idea, put our own spin on it and engage in something creative. That’s awesome for me of course because I love drawing zombies. And let’s face it zombies are a sub-genre that is chronically going back to the well for ideas. There are probably hundreds of zombie apocalypse movies that owe the majority of their ideas to “Night of the Living Dead.”

The sad fact for zombies, ghosts, horror, sci-fi, comic books, literature, everything pretty much, is that there are no truly unique ideas anymore. Thankfully that never stops anyone from trying their own version of it. And we should all be profoundly grateful for that or there would only ever be one super hero, one ghost story, one anime movie, one western, and one of anything really. And that would suck.

There is no World of Warcraft without J.R.R. Tolkien and Middle Earth. (GASP! HORRORS!) Not to mention D&D, and about a billion fantasy novels.

So I’m happy for the repetition. I’m grateful so see the next iteration of an idea that’s been done before. Without an endless supply of zombie movies life seems…. dimmer. Food loses it’s taste, the air smells staler, your kids look more and more like the milk man.

So, MrMoustachio, if you are reading this. Thank you for letting me know about Marvel Zombies (I was living under a rock and missed it), but despite your objections I’m going to keep drawing the Avenger zombies for my son. Because this is MY version of an old idea… And because I can.