Ellington

It’s 1887, and Agent William Wade is out of ammo. He brandishes a pair of brutal spikes, laying into the approaching hoard of undead without hesitation.

One of them rushes toward him, screaming savagely.

“Shut. The f---. Up. You brain-dead b----,” he cries and drives a spike into her forehead, right above her rectangular glasses. “You just don’t know when to let go!”

In three short panels, the comic book “Rotten” gives a new, gruesomely literal meaning to skewering someone with satire: The corpse is the spitting image of Sarah Palin.

This was no accident; authors Mark Rahner and Robert Horton fill their genre-bending series to the brim with ghastly political commentary, and they barely make an effort to hide it.

“It would be impossible for it to be Sarah Palin, because it’s 1887,” said Horton, a UW alumnus who describes himself as a film critic “in real life.”

“Also, it’s smarter; being brain-dead, it kind of has a jump on her.”

Horton and Rahner chose this particular year because they began work on the series during the Bush administration and claim there are unmistakable parallels. Rutherford B. Hayes became President in 1887 after an intense controversy in the electoral college. He lost the popular vote to Samuel J. Tilden but assumed office anyway after a long debate.

“Setting it back then was obviously a parallel to George Bush stealing the presidency, but it was also a chance to wipe the slate clean,” said Rahner, who wrote for The Seattle Times before moving into comic-book writing full time. “No mass communication, no television, no real knowledge of viruses and diseases.”

This weird interbreeding of pre-industrial and 21st-century America birthed a comic that has the feel of an old John Wayne movie, cowboy hats and six-shooters included.

This was an important stylistic choice for the authors, both of whom are Western fans. The limited science and communication barriers make the outbreak of undead all the more mysterious.

“These guys, when they’re first confronted by these outbreaks, nobody’s ever heard of a zombie before,” Horton said. “We haven’t used the word ‘zombie’ yet.”

The old-school setting and dialogue is a departure from works like “Zombieland” and “The Walking Dead,” both of which conform to the near-future apocalyptic formula used in so many zombie stories.

But mostly, the prevailing views of the time of are just another vehicle for the authors’, shall we say, enthusiastic opinions.

“Oddly, after 9/11, the United States appeared to be the only country in the civilized world that was going backward in the rise of religiousness,” Rahner said. “We saw an opportunity to parallel that too, just the way for a crisis to cause people to go bug-f--- and freak out and let loose of what makes them rational, civilized, scientific people.”

Horton and Rahner think American culture is devolving, losing the ability to reason. A not-so-subtle example of their commentary on this appears in volume two of “Rotten.” When Agent Wade and his counterpart, Agent J.J. Flynn, ride into the town of Ezekiel, they discover religious fanatic Father von Becker holds it in an iron grip.

If the name doesn’t give it away, the blond crew-cut and blue eyes will; von Becker is a 19th-century doppelganger of conservative radio personality Glenn Beck, and the citizens of Ezekiel are his dutiful followers.

His fate is even worse than that of the Palin zombie.

Rahner and Horton don’t apologize for their politics. In fact, they are frustrated by what Rahner called the “glut of zombie material on the market.” In their opinion, most of it lacks deeper meaning.

“It’s almost all a band of survivors in a modern-day zombie apocalypse,” Rahner said. “If you look back at the early George A. Romero stuff that was actually good, they were all very bluntly talking about what was going on at the time.”

The authors’ approach to publication seems to mirror their liberal ideology. They own all the rights to “Rotten” and publish through Moonstone Books, a small, independent company.

But independent publishing comes with its own set of hurdles. The circulation is limited, and the first volume of “Rotten” is currently out of print. According to Rahner, striking out on your own to publish a comic book requires an extraordinary amount of work, and there is no way to guarantee regular publication.

“This started in the summer of 2009,” he said. “It is now February of 2012, and we have a grand total of 11 issues. That’s frustrating.”

On the other hand, not everyone is willing to publish the kind of comic these two want to produce, and they know it. Despite the difficulties they’ve had with Moonstone Books, the company has never asked them to change a single dirty word or partisan wisecrack.

“If we were writing for Marvel or DC this wouldn’t be tolerated for an instant, because they’re owned by giant mega-corporations, and they don’t want to piss anybody off,” Rahner said. “Our sole intent is to piss everybody off.”

This is a bit of an exaggeration; “Rotten” is too fast-paced and entertaining to anger everyone. Although Rahner and Horton have an agenda, the cowboy aesthetic and imaginative fight scenes — zombies vs. grizzly bears, for instance — prove that entertainment by way of gratuitous violence is also a priority.

“You can wash down our insufferable politics and reactions to what’s going on in the world with tons and tons of blood,” Rahner said.

The authors will be signing copies of “Rotten” at the U-Book Store at 7 p.m. today.

Reach reporter Joseph Sutton-Holcomb at arts@dailyuw.com.