I think these images are pretty recognisable to old school gamers as an
AD&D Troll, but these aren't from some long lost TSR module or a
new OSR adventure, but have taken from the comic strip
Marching Zombies, which appeared in the comic Black Cat Mysteries #35 in May 1952.
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| Marching Zombies / Black Cat Mysteries / Rudy Palais 1953 |
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| Marching Zombies / Black Cat Mysteries / Rudy Palais 1953 |
And here is the 1977 Monster Manual entry by DCS, just in case your every nightmare isn't already haunted by these freaky creatures:
Rudy Palais
drawings of "Marching Zombies" bare little resemblance at all to the
popular or folkloric creatures. Instead they seem to be based on the
fact that our noses and ears continue to grow long into our old age long
after the rest of us stops, so these immortal undead, with their long
noses, sunken eyes and elongated ears might simply be the result of
extended ageing (something for our off-world
transhumanist colonies
to consider), and their gaunt emaciated figures from lack of eating.
The scaly skin, however isn't so easily explained away.
The story of
Marching Zombies
itself is, in a word: weird. Two pith-helmeted adventurers are
wandering in a desert looking for a lost civilisation when they come
across a city of
Trolls Zombies, who believe they have
to kill some humans in order release them from a curse which keeps them
from resting in eternal slumber. However, when the
Trolls Zombies kill the adventurers, instead of releasing them from their curse, their god "Kalu" turns the humans into a proper
George A. Romero flesh-hanging-off style living dead zombies, telling the
Trolls Zombies to bury the humans in the graves intended for the
Trolls Zombies and further curses the
Trolls Zombies to walk the earth for eternity. To further add to the confusion, most of the
Trolls Zombies seem to be carrying human heads on sticks - which presumably they got from murdered humans already?
Moral of the story, never trust a Zombie Troll God.
On
a self-referential level, it's also interesting because the Trowes
(erm.. 'zombie-trolls') of my Bearoak Campaign are very much undead
creatures (loosely based on Algonquian Wendigo fakelore, with an
obligatory dash of Beowulf). but I digress...
The nature of Trolls is well documented to have been borrowed wholesale Porl Andersons
Three Hearts and Three Lions (which is predated by
Marching Zombies by nearly 10 years
) - regeneration, fire damage ect - all of which was also lifted wholesale from
AD&D by Citadel for
Warhammer. None of this appears in
Marching Zombies, - it's just the appearance that seems to have been translated. UPDATE:
some new information has surfaced on this.
Unlike
the pig-faced goons in Walt Disney's Sleeping Beauty (1959) potentially being influential on the pig-faced orcs,
the similarities between Rudy Palais zombies and the AD&D Troll
here seem more than coincidental. The Coeurl / Displacer Beast is a
pretty well known example of TSRs creative borrowing, but it makes me
wonder how many classic D&D creatures have their visual origins
in earlier incarnations of the weird and uncanny- does the true origins
of the Beholder, or a Flumph lurk in some obscure 1950s horror-fantasy
comic?
NB. I came across
Marching Zombies in Peter Normanton's excellent
The Mammoth Book of Best Horror Comics
a collection of horror comics from the 1940s to the early 2000s. By necessarily avoiding the EC/DC/Marvel titles, Normanton pulls out some
pretty impressive obscure (to me at least) titles. The stories I've read
so far are thoroughly entertaining and Normantons commentary really
informative. I'd always assumed the Comics Code Authority and the 1950s
comic-book burning was just over-zealous right wing American censorship
nuttery, but as it turns out there was some really graphic
sadomasochistic imagery and gore-fests going on - it wasn't all about
weak "Batman and Robin are gay" subtexts - but that publishers were
putting out some very adult material in books marketed to children.
Find out more of the mysterious origins of the D&D Troll in
TROLLDAWN II
