I remember the night perfectly. I worked in the booth at a local radio station. My job is to spread the news. That night, I was called in on out of nowhere. I was asked to interrupt the regularly scheduled programming to communicate live on a series of “race riots” rising from the rural outskirts of Pennsylvania. They keep saying “caution anyone in the area to stay indoors.“

This is the first sign. I know race riots don’t often spread, but I’m concerned about people’s safety, so I do what I’m told. I… we… we start receiving conflicting reports on a great deal of turmoil all over the Eastern United states. I hear about waves of mass murders in the streets. I feel my palms get sweaty as I read this over the broadcast. Most nights I usually picture a family in their living room gathering to hear my reports – but tonight all I could hear were screams and they’re not even in my head.

I can’t really tell you what people believed during all this. But the reports all seem to confirm mass hysteria. Injury reports came in around the thousands. I couldn’t keep up. I keep reading the word “bites” but it doesn’t make any sense. Bite injuries are pretty uncommon other than wild animal attacks and those never happen in the thousands. I hear murmurs that the wounds seemingly culminate in a moaning hysteric state. I’m now sure this was a spreading infection.

Within the last four minutes of my broadcast I receive numerous reports of Ambulances all over the countryside. I can’t lock down any good or confirmed reasoning for the hysteria. I advise my listeners that I have no official explanation for what’s going on. At this point my boss takes me off the air and tells me martial law has not been declared but we need to stay indoors. I’m torn between going back on the air and running for my life.

The whole time I’m on the air I hadn’t looked past the soundbooth. Inside the studio there is absolute chaos. Phones were ringing off their hooks. There was hardly anyone left save for my boss and I. The place looked like a bomb went off, papers everywhere, absolute anarchy, and this is when I lose it. See, I usually tap my fingers on something, anything, whenever I’m nervous. I can hear it. But, this time I wasn’t even aware of my hands. I expected to look down and see my hands nervously tremoring.

But they’re not moving – my hands are perfectly still. That tapping comes from the windows outside…

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This Zomblog was born out of collaboration. I’ve just joined the ranks of Double Take’s comic writing team. For the unfamiliar, Double Take is a brand new comic publisher out of New York city that us launching a fully shared universe centered around George A Romero’s 1968 classic Night of the Living Dead and this blog is meant to tell you a little more about their writing process.

What you just read was an example of what Double Take Editor in Chief Bill Jemas calls a “moth story.” I apologize if it was terrible. But the idea is to embody a first person narrative in the most intimate of ways. As part of the writing process Double Take has their storytellers share something personal from their own lives in an effort to tell a prose anecdote. The goal of which is to give the script a much more lifelike approach to dialogue. See, the short moth story (the name comes from a tremendous podcast – find it here.) can be repurposed into the script to add in dialogue for characters who would otherwise be spouting constant exposition.

For this story to make the most sense you can see that perhaps this would accompany someone in a comic trying to stay alive in a radio station. But the idea is for this story to have as little to do with what’s going on in the comic as possible. For Double Take, they want these short stories to create a world of dialogue more like Pulp Fiction than your typical Superman or Batman script.

The final result is something that remains a little more human than people just trying to survive zombies. Beyond the actual terrifying situation you have a group of very lived in people just trying to connect. Often the media is used to create this rift between the common man and the survivor in the zombie genre.

But ideally the media would be this act of connection. This less on the nose approach of delivering exposition and the more human struggle about delivering the news and inciting a level of anarchy unlike anything ever witnessed. So you’ll notice the beginning of Dawn of the Dead’s director’s cut the media broadcast team talks about anything OTHER than the zombie outbreak. It’s way more about being on the air and the need for viewers. Of course it eventually goes to the expected place – but the drama rises from something else entirely.

The characters in Double Take stories won’t have emotionally fall out from the zombies themselves but because of the people they used to be. The drama will arise in the central conflict but the organization of these scripts ensures something more human and engaging remains on the page.

Trust me – I was skeptical too. But the moth story approach to scripting comics results in far more engaging zombie storytelling than comics have ever seen.

Comics are more about taking the characters through a visual story rather than having them announce their inner most thoughts and desires. I suppose the Moth Story is to create a subtext in what’s going on. This is an ambitious approach to storytelling that will either pay off brilliantly or seem painfully out of place once the final comics ship. But it does give a greater degree of freedom when it comes to scripting the actual issue. But that’s something else entirely.

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This Zomblog will run every Monday and Friday until I run out of things to say about zombies. Next time – we tackle social commentary and the power of the media in Zombie movies.

Until then check out Double Take’s blog – Double Take Universe to keep up to date on the incredible comics that will be coming your way in September. And head over to their Kickstarter to secure yourself the full ten launch issues.