Welcome to the End Times

Confession time: I love post apocalyptic stories.

​I always have. Something about the genre's tropes and trappings just gets my blood pumping. Give me bombed-out cities, atomic mutants, and barbaric biker gangs, and you'll keep my ass glued to the seat until the credits roll. 

Funny thing is, as long as I've had it, I've never given my apocalyptic obsession much thought. If anything, I chalked it up to watching Thundarr the Barbarian as an impressionable kid.
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Say what you want about the state of Corporate Entertainment back then. But telling your core audience they'll all be dead before they're in high school? That's a ballsy move.

Anyway, this tweet randomly came across my feed a few months back. And I haven't really stopped thinking about it: 

Folks, that right there is what we call a truth bomb. 

It might be hard for kids raised after the fall of the Soviet Union to grasp, but the threat of nuclear annihilation used to be so ubiquitous that songs about it repeatedly cracked the weekly Top 40. That's a level of cultural saturation not many disasters—looming or otherwise—have ever achieved.

Sure, you could argue the Baby Boomers had it worse when it comes to nuclear fears. After all, my mom's generation were the ones who did "duck and cover" drills at school, the teachers calmly directing them to crouch beneath their desks while they waited for the incoming blast wave.

But here's the thing. Baby Boomers never had those nuclear fears baked into their entertainment. At least not quite the same way Generation X did. Most of the "atomic scare" movies of the 50's and 60's revolved around things like giant irradiated bugs. A city or two would be terrorized, the army would roll in, and a muscular display of American Firepower would put the threat to rest. The implied message, of course, was that the bomb was scary, but everything would be all right as long as we trusted our leaders.

By the time Gen X became the primary consumers of media, that attitude shifted. Films depicting nuclear war tended to show total destruction, the collapse of society, and an almost complete return to barbarism among the survivors. The primary message here was radically different: the bomb was inevitable, nothing would be fine, and our leaders were all maniacs. 

According to these movies, the end of all civilization wasn't a question of "if." It was a question of "when."

Again, it might be tough for younger generations to grasp, but movies like Mad Max were written for audiences that fully expected a nuclear war—one they were powerless to prevent—within their lifetimes. That kind of cultural fatalism can't help but affect those consuming it, especially at such a young age. 

Which is another way of saying I ate that shit up with sugar sprinkled on top, and begged for seconds. 

The apocalypse was my jam, folks. 

Taking cues from Thundarr, I used to pretend my He-Man figures were the barbaric survivors of a devastated Earth. After watching the Mad Max films with my uncles on cable TV, most of my G. I. Joe games centered around Cobra successfully destroying the world, and the surviving Joes battling across it.

When all the kids in the neighborhood discovered Robotech, I was the only one who preferred the post apocalyptic partisans of The New Generation to the slick jet jockeys of The Macross Saga.

In my teen years, I devoured men's adventure paperbacks like William W. Johnstone's Ashes series. I watched The Road Warrior so many times that I wore out two different VHS copies of it. I stayed up late on weekends to catch Joe Bob Briggs' Monster Vision or Gilbert Gottfried's Up All Night, both of which regularly featured apocalypse-schlock classics. 

I discovered anime around the same time, immediately obsessing over Fist of the North Star and Vampire Hunter D. I borrowed a muddy, third-generation, untranslated bootleg of Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind that captivated me. When I found a copy of my own, a clean fansub sourced from the Japanese laserdisc, it became one of my prized possessions.

Hell, my own first attempts at writing fiction were nothing but violent, edge-lord apocalyptic fantasies.

The fact is, a huge amount of the stories that have influenced me over the years—from books, to anime and manga, to movies—have dealt with the apocalypse in some way. In fact, it's a big enough part of my storytelling DNA that I think it's time to dedicate a regular column on this blog to it.

So what can you expect from future installments?

Reviews, mostly. I'll be looking at apocalyptic books and movies, including some old favorites mentioned above. I might occasionally dip into games, too. And since I'm a longtime devotee of the Joe Bob Briggs school of criticism, I plan to rate them based on the factors that really matter, what I regard as the essentials of the genre. Things like violence, bloodshed, mutants, monsters, action, and gratuitous destruction porn. 
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I'll also occasionally drop some general musings on the genre: What makes it tick, how its evolved, why certain tropes seem to work, etc.

So stay tuned, wastelanders. The End Times are here. And if you ask me, they've never looked better.
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