Written/Drawn/Lettered/Created by Don Lomax
Published by Apple Comics in April 1992.
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". . . AND THE CYCLE CONTINUED, NOT UNLIKE WOUNDED ANIMALS CHEWING OFF THEIR OWN LIMBS TO FREE THEMSELVES FROM A TRAP, ONLY TO DIE SLOWLY FROM LOSS OF BLOOD!"
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Review by William D. Tucker.
In the depths of the Cold War, fear of total nuclear annihilation grips people all over the world. Some take action to prepare for the coming holocaust. One such person is Carl Miller, who invests his business wealth in survivalist gear and the construction of a bunker out in the sticks. Carl trains his wife and two sons in survival techniques including firearms training and radiation protection protocols. The family unit is transformed into a notional military unit. Notional, that is, until the ICBMs are launched.
In the comic book Survive! nuclear devastation acts as an evil spell of revelation, unveiling the inner monster inside us all, obliging us to become good neighbors with the killer inside. The stark black and white art depicts dead-eyed killers fighting for turf and dominance. Those severely damaged by radiation become zombie-looking warlords living out fantasies of neo-feudalism half-remembered from those 1970s paperback reprints of Robert E. Howard. We see one guy do his Leatherface routine, chainsaw in hand. Cannibalism comes into fashion in a big way. Slavery returns. Justice is what you can get away with, usually consisting of on-the-spot executions for crimes against property. There's no more law. There's no more nation. No longer any 'us,' just 'them.'
Even our stalwart hero, Carl, dehumanizes and destroys the people who cause him problems. A zombie warlord challenges him to a duel of machetes. Carl shoots him with a shotgun. Later, Carl is captured by a whole gang of radiation zombies, who are scarcely able to function as they once did. A zombie woman is assigned to seduce Carl that he might give up the location of his bunker. She begs him for food, and failing that, she begs for his feces. Carl executes her, and then uses chlorine gas to exterminate the rest of her gang.
No more laws. No more due process. Not even a hint of a ghost of a whisper of a veneer of civilization. Just unlimited atrocity in the name of a family unit.
And why not, right? If the great champions of Capitalism and Communism are willing to scorch billions of lives all in the name of bogus righteousness . . . what in the hell do we expect from our neighbors? A nation is just a collection of people, right? And if the actions of nations suck isn't that just an expression of the collective suck of the people? One's a democracy (USA), and the other's a totalitarian dungeon (USSR), and they're both coming to the conclusion of "Fuck it. Let's all die in a huge cluster of nuclear explosions." I guess it was prior to the New Golden Age of TV, five-hundred channels, and nothing on-less for the state-controlled media in Russia . . . ah, well . . .
Survive!'s vision is the bleakest thirty pages of comics you'll scare up from the dollar bin, Dear Reader, making The Walking Dead look like Barney the Dinosaur. Amusingly, it ends on a cliffhanger, and a mailing address to write to if you want to read more. Survive! #1 is the only issue that was ever published, as far as I am able to determine.
Gee, I wonder why?
