raccoon city punks
Writer: Dave Scheidt
Artist: Sean Mack
Color Assistant: Aaron Pittman
Author: Sean Mack
Publisher: Self-published / $20
October 2025
I myself had a great time surviving the horrors that turned Raccoon City into a sea of blood and burning rubble. It was both funny and disgusting, and as familiar as taking your favorite jewelry box off the shelf and popping a disc in it. Even better, Raccoon City Punks was going to places I had never been before. Dave Scheidt and Sean Mack are at the skate park eating Burger Kong and Take the Herb. Fan Comic Warning: As intended, this killed me.
Who lives in the situation in Resident Evil 2? Good. We all know that skate punk kids are invincible. Therein lies the tone of your book. Yes, it’s serious, the Umbrella Corporation has done something mysterious and bad again, and now everyone in town is either dead, flesh-ripping zombies, or both. Not to mention the other creatures that escaped and the heavy-handed corporate contingency plans roaming the streets. But that’s not the case. A zombie head falls off your shoulder across a public basketball court, sending it over the fence and swinging off the backboard. I hear a hissing sound, but it’s just the sound of the internet.
Raccoon City Punks has a basic Cartoon Network aesthetic. Ralph Bakshi’s wolf-in-sheep’s-clothing design, classic Harvey style, has developed into something morbid enough to make you question who this story is aimed at. Scheidt and Mack return to the visual gags of old, the physical impossibilities of early Looney Tunes cartoons and the sexy body humor of Mad Magazine. But it’s rounder and more Dexter and Gumball-coded. Mack draws comics in a world where Mighty Mouse, Nickelodeon, and Adventure Time are the past, not the future.
It seems easier to call “children’s comics that are not for children” “comics.” Shouldn’t something like this be included in an interesting book? Just because Mac’s style is cartoonish doesn’t mean he lacks artistic sophistication. I think he understands what the De Luca effect is for better than most artists who use it. Punks sometimes use the expression in its more commonly recognized usage: a shot of a large map of children skating down a street full of obstacles. However, the Mac is also used for gags that require it to move faster than the panel. Action too. And skateboarding as a flow, rather than a series of tricks, produces different hits when moments are not separated from each other in small boxes of isolated instances. Many comics are obsessed with the idea of perceiving a scene through a panel lens. Raccoon City Punks are even more raw.
Speaking of highly comical, the sound effects in Raccoon City Punk are exactly that. There’s plenty of BOOM, FWIP, and KRAK (think skateboard braking), as well as Don Martin’s SPLOOT and SPLAT, doubling down on the gristle goop that is part of Resident Evil’s appeal. but! There are also a number of my favorite advanced sequential art solutions from clever cartoonists, doing things that only comics can do. The onomatopoeia is “vomit” as the character vomits ice cream and blood, kicking a zombie in the head to the sound of a punt.
Sounds and words come together in my head in a way that doesn’t exist anywhere else. It’s funny and absurd, and it’s the kind of audience collaboration that only reading can have. In your mind you can hear what the indescribable sounds are like. And eating shit on the asphalt while listening to beef sounds is thoroughly Shakespearean.
Is that why it’s not suitable for children? Bud rather than refinement? There’s gore, but it doesn’t seem to matter on screen, it’s ropey, goofy stuff. Everyone has guts like a snake in a joke shop nut can. Is Leon a rock bottom, red grass burning stoner? I’m going to argue that this isn’t the first time video games and drugs have come into contact. It’s like an undeveloped hill to die on. Come to think of it, the curse. Is it vulgar or funny? Do we want our children to learn the difference between what is funny and what is not? ACAB has a police officer in your head. I’m sure this will be fine for the children.
Scheidt has drawn some very successful YA comics, but despite the author’s foothold in the established publishing world, here he’s completely DIY. ‘Punks’ is clearly a labor of love, clearly made in a home-made, hand-crafted manner rather than using a publishing machine to publish a book. Raccoon City Punks are spiral-wound (red, a surprisingly easy design choice). Thick, thick double-colored pages created directly from the Riso machine. Gradient coloring (assisted by longtime collaborator Aaron Pittman) utilizes hardware similar to CRT effects on pixels. There is a tactile weight and process presence that alerts the reader to the bespoke nature of this book. Not glamorously professional, but overly bohemian.
It’s probably the kind of fan comic that requires DIY. Established franchises can be difficult to imitate. There’s no way this comic will clear all the samples (so to speak) if it has to start as a pitch to rights holders, or if this kind of thing gets picked up by mainstream channels. Editor? Do the manga publishers that publish Capcom content still employ editors? There’s too much DGAF in this scene. So what you get instead is just as goofy as you want it to be. There are no filters. no problem.
This is what I wish was a fan or (sigh) licensed IP comic. Even if you removed the direct references, it would still be a fun, weird, and original little mayhem bloody horror story. Scheidt and Mac were inspired, and something new was born from it. Godzilla MISC made me feel that way. Is Minilla in Scooby-Doo, an art school student and venture capital company? Raccoon City Punks is the story of three cranky kids looking out for each other and searching for animal jaws. Resident Evil 2 is the icing on the cake.
So you can now grab references and spin them, making this a geeky nirvana for those in the know. Literally, spin it. Mr. X grabs Licker’s tongue and spins it around his head like a gross towel. You don’t need to know who/what these people, creatures, and human creatures (?) are in the game to have fun with the punks, but it’s helpful to know. Scheidt and Mack enjoy the freedom to flip things around wherever they please. The zombie dogs cannot overcome their riot dog nature and end up siding with Punk instead of Umbrella. Because in every good zombie world, there are good kids as well as those bubs.
As modern comic book readers, we’re in a strange place. There, fan comics have shown that established legacies have the ability to inspire new and original storytelling, but much of what is licensed is trapped by the joyless and unending pursuit of new ways of self-referencing. The heart of punks is kids, not effective branding. punks. A big part of the effectiveness of survival horror video games is experiencing it firsthand (sort of). Splurge and run away. The Raccoon City Punks take it away, creating a disc-to-book gap, but Scheidt and Mack’s skaters clear it.
Raccoon City Punks is available wherever Dave Scheidt and more niche comics and books are sold.
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