A prequel to the horror classic Night of the Living Dead.
Back in the late 1960s, writer/director George A. Romero, co-writer John A. Russo, and a team of collaborators scraped up some cash and went into production on a movie they referred to as “the ultimate monster flick.” The result was one of the greatest horror movies ever made and the movie I have watched more than any other in existence, Night of the Living Dead.
Romero and Russo would both return to the concept they had created with that film, the idea of flesh-eating ghouls, with Romero’s most beloved follow-ups being Dawn of the Dead and Day of the Dead, while Russo wrote the novel Return of the Living Dead, which was quite different from the Return of the Living Dead movie Dan O’Bannon made. In the early 2000s, around the time Romero was getting Land of the Dead out into the world, Russo teamed with comics publisher Avatar Press for a few different Living Dead titles – including Night of the Living Dead: The Beginning, a prequel that leads directly into the events of the classic film.
Russo provided the story for the three-issue series, with Mike Wolfer writing the “sequential adaptation” and Sebastian Fiumara handling the artwork with colorist Andrew Dalhouse.
In Night of the Living Dead, the character Ben has a monologue about events that took place around a location called Beekman’s Diner: “(Zombies are) afraid of fire. I found that out. You know a place back down the road called Beekman’s, Beekman’s Diner? Anyhow, that’s where I found that truck I have out there. There’s a radio in the truck. I had jumped in to listen to it when a big gasoline truck came screaming right across the road with, it must have been 10, 15 of those things chasing after it, grabbing and holding on. Now I didn’t see them at first. I could just see that the truck was moving in a funny way and those things were catching up to it. The truck went right across the road. I slammed on my brakes to keep from hitting it myself. It went right through the guard rail. I guess the driver must have cut off the road into that gas station by Beekman’s Diner. It went right through the billboard, ripped over a gas pump and never stopped moving. By now it’s like a moving bonfire. Didn’t know if the truck was going to explode or what. Still hear the man screaming. This thing is just backing away from it. I looked back at the diner to see if there was anyone there who could help me. That was when I noticed that the entire place had been encircled. There wasn’t a sign of life left except… By now there were no more screams. I realized that I was alone with 50 or 60 of those things just standing there staring at me. I started to drive, I just plowed right through them. They didn’t move, they didn’t run. Just stood there staring at me. I just wanted to crush them. They scattered through the air like bugs.”
Well, that happens in Night of the Living Dead: The Beginning, but you have to wait until the end of the third issue to see it, because that’s when Ben drives away from Beekman’s Diner and makes his way into Night of the Living Dead.
Along the way, we see other familiar faces and locations in The Beginning. It actually starts with a young woman named Christine saying goodbye to her grandmother, who lives in the Night of the Living Dead farmhouse, and heading to work at Beekman’s Diner with her boyfriend, Jim. Meanwhile, another couple – Don and Cathy – are on a bus, heading back to their hometown of Willard, Pennsylvania, where they plan to meet up with Tom and Judy, characters Ben meets in Night of the Living Dead.
Don and Cathy don’t make it to Willard. Their bus crashes off the road and everyone on board is killed – which shows that Russo really likes to mix the ideas of zombies and bus crashes, because there’s also a bus crash in his Return of the Living Dead novel. We also catch up with a pair of gravediggers, who are preparing to put a coffin in the ground when the coffin’s inhabitant rises from the dead – a scene reminiscent of something Russo added to Night of the Living Dead for its 30th anniversary edition.
While zombies start to fill the countryside, we follow Christine and Jim to Beekman’s Diner – and on the last page of issue one, we see that the Black man with a briefcase sitting in one of the booths is Ben.
Around the time that Night of the Living Dead characters Barbra and Johnny are driving to visit their father’s grave in the Evans City Cemetery, as seen both at the start of Night of the Living Dead and the first page of The Beginning issue 2, zombies are busting into the farmhouse to turn Christine’s grandmother into the corpse that’s found upstairs in the movie. At the same time, the people in Beekman’s Diner also become aware that flesh-eating maniacs are surrounding the place.
As expected, the people stuck in this pressure cooker situation do not get along very well and are soon arguing over the best plan of action. Turns out, the argument-filled events of Night of the Living Dead must have given Ben quite a feeling of déjà vu, because he had been through something similar and had been butting heads with other people just hours earlier. And while Ben’s race is never addressed in the movie (since the character had been written as a white man, but ended up being Black simply because actor Duane Jones came in and gave the best audition), there are people in The Beginning who dislike him just due to his skin tone.
It’s kind of surprising that Russo and Wolfer didn’t use this opportunity to check in on other Night of the Living Dead characters and show how they ended up in the farmhouse, but when it comes to main characters, the comic book story only fills in Ben’s background. It does show how Sheriff McClelland, who was shown leading a zombie-blasting posse in the film, became aware of the zombie outbreak, though.
Night of the Living Dead: The Beginning is a fun read with some cool artwork that, like other Avatar Press books I’ve read, goes heavy on the gore and the gratuitous nudity. A girlfriend playfully flashes her bare buttocks, a female zombie is wearing a dress that’s torn just right to reveal a bare breast, a zombie tears off a woman’s clothes and exposes her underwear, etc. It’s more the approach that Bill Hinzman (who played the Cemetery Ghoul in Night of the Living Dead) took to the making of his own zombie movie, FleshEater, than the approach Romero and Russo took to Night of the Living Dead, but it works for the purposes of this book.
I don’t fully accept this as the background of the Ben character and won’t be thinking of it when I watch Night of the Living Dead – partially because I feel that it gives Ben too much information about the zombies before he gets to the farmhouse, and also because, as mentioned, having him butt heads with fellow survivors in two different locations in one night is too much déjà vu. But I enjoyed reading it.
Note: Marvel Comics will not be covered in Racks and Stacks articles, as they have their own article series.
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