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A couple of weeks ago I talked up the praises of inserting the occasional stoicism in your absurdity, and vice-versa. I brought up the TV trope phenomenon of Mood Whiplash, where the tone shifts abruptly, and how when done right it enhances emotion and storytelling. One famous example of this is arguably the biggest scream moment in the movie Jaws, where Brody is crankily shoveling chum into the ocean, mumbling a disgruntled laugh line just before the giant shark surges out of the water, clearly showing us (and him) its titular pearly whites for the first time. It’s a shocking moment and any laughter chokes immediately into stunned horror. And then it’s right back to a laugh line, but a much more somber one, clearly one delivered because Brody’s mind just can’t think of any goddamn thing else to say as he backs up slowly to the false safety of the wheelhouse: “You’re gonna need a bigger boat.”
Another prime example that has stuck with me comes from the pages of Alan Moore’s run on Swamp Thing. Moore retooled the origin story into something existentially horrific: up until those moments, the Swamp Thing was a mutated Alec Holland, a human being still under all that plant matter. Then Moore flipped the script, using the analysis of a cold-hearted scientist discussing the once-held belief that living flatworms seemed to absorb the knowledge and memories of a dead one that they ate (heck that’s been the premise of some zombie stories, too).
The reveal of all this is that the Swamp Thing was not, indeed, ever Alec Holland, but a product of mystical/mutant plant matter that fed upon Alec Holland’s murdered remains and regenerated itself based on a memory, a lie that it had lived as a man. The swamp thing does not take this well and has brutally murdered the scientist by the end of the issue.
Where’s the whiplash? The barbecue.
In truth I can’t remember if it was the same issue or the next, but ST suffers what can only be classed as either a dream or a psychotic break, if plants-that-think-like-men can be said to be capable of such. What he sees is a backyard grill manned by human-sized flatworms, one of which is wearing a chef’s hat and a “KISS THE COOK”-style apron as he looks at ST and enthusiastically shouts, “Eats! Come getcha eats!”
It’s a height of absurdity, something that made me laugh out loud at the time, and a brilliant example of wielding that whiplash to great effect because it’s happening smack in the middle of all that aforementioned existential and physical horror. Much like Martin Brody couldn’t wrap his mind around the size of the shark and the realization of what deep shit the three men on the Orca were in, the Swamp Thing’s consciousness is trying to process a concept of absolute madness, and so resorts to absolute madness to visualize such.
And here we are with Zombie Ranch, where this current run of the “cartoon dramatization” is perhaps my most ambitious attempt yet to intermix absurdity with what is in actually a deeply disturbing, defining, and tragic moment of the past. Time to see if I can get that whipcrack to work, or if I just end up hitting myself in the eye.