Thanks in part to a Huntington Beach advertising agency, The Walking Dead fans can not only use an app to design their own vehicle to help survive the zombie apocalypse, but if the graphic novel's creator Robert Kirkman chooses your mock-up, a built-out version will be unveiled by him at October's New York Comic-Con.
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The full-service ad firm INNOCEAN USA announced the launch of “The Walking Dead Chop Shop,” which debuted at San Diego's recent Comic-Con International.
Presented by Hyundai (whose U.S. headquarters is in Fountain Valley) and created in partnership with content marketing group Future US and Kirkman's Skybound imprint at Image Comics, the chop show is an offshoot of the 2012 “Hyundai Undead” marketing campaign for the 2013 Elantra Coupe. That campaign had Kirkman re-designing an Elantra as a zombie survival machine, something that led to so much sustained social media debate and opinions about what fans would have done to their own vehicles that the parties involved took notice, according to Greg Braun, executive creative director at INNOCEAN USA.
“'The Walking Dead Chop Shop' gives fans this opportunity, putting them in the drivers' seat with an initiative that is true to the comic book series' narrative,” Braun explains.
An interactive web app that allows non-walkers to outfit their own anti-walker ride is at walkingdeadchopshop.com. An app for iPhones and iPads can be downloaded from iTunes, and an Android app is said to be coming soon. (Visit walkingdeadchopshop.com or thewalkingdead.com for more information.)
Fans can enter their designs into a contest over the coming months before Kirkman hand selects which one will be built into a real car.
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OC Weekly Editor-in-Chief Matt Coker has been engaging, enraging and entertaining readers of newspapers, magazines and websites for decades. He spent the first 13 years of his career in journalism at daily newspapers before “graduating” to OC Weekly in 1995 as the alternative newsweekly’s first calendar editor.