Pink Zombie Rose Comics By Dia

Pink Zombie Rose was written durin decade of artistic seclusion.

her sister liked it, and social media, then several rounds of test readers. finally, it was sent to lit mags in July of 2022.

Editors had immediate feedback - "Dia, you've written a series of graphic novels."

By August, Beppi had signed onto the project.

The duo is well paired. both artists are interested in the contagion of culture.

The Undeads

strings & Attractors

You’ve always been more camcorder than human. You still remember your 5-second father and how he looked at your newborn face. “It’s squished,” because yes, it was a hard trip down a narrow shaft. “It looks like a gyro.” We’re strung with the threads of time, in articulated skeletons, so it shouldn’t be this easy to slip into the past. A Netflix-subscriber should not smell the butchered goat as it gives its living sinew to a puppet, who will only play-act the words of men. Herodotus and Xenophon.

Death / reversed

A single lifetime is a shuffling deck. You’ve been ham-strung like the hanged man, all the blood rushing to your brain. You’ve been a star, with your feet in the water, and a devil, with your horns in the flames. Culture consists of repeating components: memetic forms, geometric patterns and Freudian slips. Over the corpse of your life, the cards have been kindred spirits. At 17, you piled a German Shepherd into a motorcycle sidecar and drove the rickety contraption across the American desert. That was your fool phase.

Heart of December

Frost crosses the world, a crackle of sugar poured out and smoothed flat like stained glass, dotted with flower petals, and you share yourself in shards which you hand out to the children so they can imagine a time when the earth was still golden. You’d think death would be like the cave of a hibernating bear, but it’s a thousand family recipes, scratched out and written over, floured and translucent with grease. These recipes call for items not known to our world.

Stop The World and Melt

Ice cold. Ice. Beer. Ice cold beer. Icicles melt all in a row. Eternity is lateral. Time isn’t a ladder, but rather, a sidewise thing; icicles hanging from the eaves, shiny with neon. Each icicle is you and each falling droplet is a moment in your life, all dripping at once. None of the icicles can matter much, none of the moments, because there’s so many, and they are melting.

Rubberband Girl

The further you stretch, the more space you have, the more stars you accumulate; weighty neutrinos, left over from the big bang. When neutrinos are around other neutrinos, they are lighter. Apart, they pack on mass. Increasingly distant from your fellow neutrinos, a space taken up with tension and dark energy, you make the universe more stretchy.

Holy Toledo

Over the course of your career as court jester, serving many kings, you’ve made thousands of balloon animals. You’ve folded origami, lightning fast, and performed elaborate rope tricks where the audience would swear it was triple knotted, but it pulled loose like nothing. They’re shocked, like they don’t know how easily things come undone. You possess geometric clarity, an innate understanding of multitudinous form. The whole world is bumpety bump, upside down and backwards. Twisted. Kinked.

Body without organs

The future is hard on the hyena, you knew it would be, but you weren’t expecting it to be so gory, the hyena’s seizing and rattling, with such velocity, such technology, that his brain melts and drips out of his nostrils like hot lava, and the hyena is vomiting blood and micro plastics and a valyrian sword engraved with glittering glyphs and the 16th season of Gilmore Girls and the hyena has alphabet now so it screams in 700 languages: "Siri, siri, how could you do this to me?! Siri, order the dish soap! Siri, we don't care if it comes in Russian doll boxes from Amazon, oh god, Siri, that feels good, Siri, spit in my mouth, sit on my face, Siri!”

Seeds that grew from stone

The roses are drunk on ghost power. As a light being, you can understand. It’s intoxicating to escape the mortal coil, to see into your very cells, polluted with porn and microplastics. Your corpse is a hyper object. You feel this keenly as the omnipotent iris opens wider and wider until you begin to wonder if you’re being sucked into a black hole. You are

on the blink

You can’t visit your mother because coffee makes you shit and the cognitive dissonance pulls you apart like a chicken carcass. You had an existential crisis in Mom’s ruffled bathroom when you realized the world was a ruffle, a folded tapeworm, upper sides, undersides, and each teeming surface was oblivious to the next. Parallel dimensions were close enough to hear the yammer of their neighbors--and do--but they never notice the frequency slipping.

In the air (in the teeth)

She says that the way that people say things, aloud, but she is surprised by that. She is embarrassed at the way it leaves her mouth, gray and dusty, like gravel. That dust kicks up and, suddenly, you know things about her that you should not know. Like she used to be a soldier in the Greek army, a merciless killer, and later, she was a mobster’s murdered girlfriend, stuck in the body of an angry child. Before that, she was just an “unfortunate accident” on an ocean liner.

PZR Classic Goes Graphic

She's got jaws

Cars were patchwork squares, parked in gravel and equipped with speakers. The flaps were off the jeep so she felt the breeze on her red-hot skin. Twinkling pinpricks of light were invisible at dusk but the stars were there, nonetheless. Between the seats, a cooler sweated. Plunged into the ice, beer bottles nestled snickers bars. She took one bite leaving teeth marks in cold chocolate. Night came in with ribbons of pink. Angelique thought of Emmanuel Lewis; dissolving forms lost to darkness as “absence” becomes “presence.” She raised her bottle for a hard clink. Liam toasted: “Here’s to swimmin’ with bow-legged women.”

Everyday is Halloween

The television was a vestigial god. Wonky antenna -- a V -- was topped with two blobs of tinfoil. It came on with a pop. The image wore an angora sweater, obscured and fluffy. Modern flat-screens showed the weather girl’s pores. High def defeated the whole point. TV should have silly props, bad dubs and plot holes. Storytelling should offer respite from reality. While Aton coveted the artifact, he also liked it right where it was. Here, in his colleague’s office, with the crayon drawings and photos of gap toothed children. The television was everything he loved about Eric, who lately looked like his TV. Old and on the fritz, with a blob of tinfoil hair. Mere months into the apocalypse, Eric was already going gray.

White teeth / Black Leather

Shane had done his assigned homework. He filled out worksheets about emotional needs, love languages and attachment styles. He did all of the recommended readings. He studied up on autism and the psychology of enmeshed identicals. Atom demanded massive preparation for a relationship that was already dead in the water. Shane should get a gold foil star at least.