This time I'm going to deal with comics and that most subjective of subjects, taste, especially when it comes to bad taste.  Unlike such fairly easily definable elements as sex, nudity and 'bad' language, taste is a matter of personal preference that reflects individual sensitivity and judgment.

I've lived long enough to have seen what's deemed permissible in movies, TV and comics change radically over just a couple of decades.  I try hard not to be a hidebound, blue-nosed old fossil, but keep finding myself slightly stunned by what's become acceptable today, especially on children's entertainment.  On an episode of the new Cartoon Network Saturday morning series Robotboy, a character casually used the term 'fartknocker,' a word that was scandalous just a decade ago when I first heard it coined on Beavis & Butt-Head.

But then, that's how things work in this country; what once was extreme quickly gets mainstreamed.  Take, for example, zombies, not the fairly harmless sleepwalkers who once scared Bob Hope in The Ghostbreakers, but the relentless brain eaters who populated George Romero's legendary Night of the Living Dead.

They've been popular among hard-core horror fans for decades, but I've seen them make their way from fringe midnight show cult favorites like the Evil Dead movies to such mainstream successes as 28 Days and the British horror-comedy Shaun of the Dead.  Now they're everywhere, from video games like House of the Dead and Resident Evil to the popular paperback (Dark Star has sold over fifty copies of it) The Zombie Survival Guide by Max Brooks.

The way things keep going, I predict within five years there'll be a TV series about a racially diverse, extremely photogenic group of humans attempting to survive in a zombie-infested world.  It might be on an adult-skewing late night animated series, an edgy Showtime drama, or even the NBC daytime drama Passions trying to shore up its sagging ratings by bringing the undead to the sleepy hamlet of Harmony (it's a show desperate for attention; this month they'll be a Bollywood style musical extravaganza).

And when it happens you can blame it squarely on the unlikely hit Image comic book The Walking Dead by Robert Kirkman and Charlie Adlard.  What's likely to make it (or something identical but legally non-actionable; as Fred Allen once put it, imitation is the sincerest form of television) irresistible to some television producer is it's both outre (networks constantly being on the lookout for something different enough to arouse interest in an increasingly stupefied audience) and that most ubiquitous of TV genres, the soap opera.  Kirkman's main innovation has been to domesticate the genre so ultimately it's really not all that different from Lost.

I think one of the keys to taste is context because I like zombies (I saw the 1990 remake of Night of the Living Dead in a theater and cheered), just the way I enjoy The Walking Dead comic book, but that doesn't mean I want to see a television drama about them.  And I definitely don't want to see Marvel super-heroes turned into ravenous flesh eaters, as seen in the Kirkman-written Marvel Zombie mini-series.

Marvel could have chosen any number of ways to jump on the current zombie bandwagon; reviving Simon Garth from Tales of the Zombie, Mort the Dead Teenager, or Deathlok (I keep waiting for DC, in a fit of  'me too!' to give us a Solomon Grundy, Zombie Fighter comic).  But instead they've decided to be 'outrageous' and give us a comic where the Marvel superheroes have devoured the bulk of earth's population and have extended chats about their condition.

I didn't find it either fun or funny and I'd like to say we took special care to make sure the comic didn't fall into the hands of younger readers, but the first three issues have been instant sell-outs.  Bringing us to the most important thing about taste when you're a retailer; to quote Joe Dirt, 'It's not what you like, it's the consumer.'

Though it is interesting just how much taste varies.  Marvel has decided that just being gay (he doesn't have to do anything gay) is enough to confine The Rawhide Kid to the Max line and keep him absent from their upcoming Western Month event, but having an undead Hulk gnawing on The Silver Surfer's skull and bellowing 'Hulk wants more meat!' only warrants a T+ rating.

I was comforting myself with the thought that when Marvel finally gets hold of a fad it's pretty much certain to be over, but life is full of surprises.  On the cover of the just released Scooby Doo #105 was the story Dog of the Dead (if Harvey were still publishing comics we'd probably be seeing Curtis the Cuddly Corpse).

But it's nice that we have the chance to decide, for ourselves, what's offensive.  While much of the world is in turmoil over cartoons of the prophet Mohammad, this month we retailers have the opportunity to order from Image Loaded Bible:  Jesus vs. Vampires.