why is there no "night of the living dead" for contemporary comics?

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I'm not the 1st person to make this observation and it's not even the 1st time I've made it. one of the joys I've retained from my childhood is reading comic books, although I'm more likely now to read them in graphic novel or collected form, and I'm likelier to read them for free in libraries and bookstores. that's what I've done with this free rainy afternoon and I've come away feeling depressed.

comic book authors in my youth wrote exciting but meaningless and unrealistic stories about exciting but unrealistic people. today's authors are still writing about unrealistic people but they're behaving more and more like the nastiest people you're likely to meet. whole swathes of bystanders, innocent and villainous, are shredded in each story as if every one was a match in a book and with about as much interest on the part of the writer as a child gives a single match when he has a whole box beside him.

part of the reason I gave up reading comic books in the late 70s-early 80s was that the stories didn't reflect reality as I was coming to know it and as I was coming to experience it in other art forms. comic book writing today strikes me as being at about the same level as the writing of horror films in the early 70s as filmmakers were intoxicated by the idea of lifting the restraint that good was always rewarded and bad always punished, and the idea that death could come to anyone sitting at home as quickly and horrifically as it could to someone carrying a flashlight with burned-out batteries into a dark house. but the impetus has been on finding newer and more personal ways of slicing into one another rather than on new ways of telling those stories.

there are, of course, exceptions, many, many exceptions. and I don't really have much right to complain. I'm not, after all, the audience they're written for. I read them for free, after all, and as a luxury after I've gotten my more important work done. who are they written for? sometimes I think I know--kids for whom the bitterness and hypocrisies of watergate and vietnam, even if they don't know the names, are a given; kids for whom attending an r-rated movie was never a rite of passage but something available on tv after school; kids whose grandparents marched so a black man could be elected president and whose parents march so he'll be impeached.

I don't want to sound like I should be on the edge of my lawn waving a cane--I don't think I really should be taken into consideration by comic writers or readers. but I wonder if for these kids there will ever be a comic they can look back on the way I look back on night of the living dead or phantasm or rabid or the exorcist, as attempts to articulate something for which gore and sudden death was an integral part of the message, which was something about the inexplicability of life and our feeble reactions to it, and not just something to say "kewl!" to and go on to the next page.