Halloween Beat: RACCOON CITY PUNKS skate for their lives

Raccoon City Punks
Writer: Dave Scheidt
Artist: Sean Mac
Color Assists: Aaron Pittman
Letterer: Sean Mac
Publisher: Self-published / $20
October 2025

I for one had a great time surviving the horrors that turned Raccoon City into bloody pools and flaming rubble. It was funny, it was disgusting, it was as familiar as pulling your favorite jewel case off the shelf and popping in a disc. Better still, Raccoon City Punks was going somewhere I hadn’t been before. Dave Scheidt and Sean Mac are down in the skatepark, eating Burger Kong and Taking the Herb. Fan comic alert: this killed me, as intended.

Who lives in a Resident Evil 2 situation? Well. Everyone knows skate punk kids are invincible. And there’s your book tone right there. Yeah, it’s serious, the Umbrella Corporation has once again done something mysterious and bad and now everyone in town is either dead, a flesh ripping zombie, or both. To say nothing of the other creatures that have escaped, or the heavy treading corporate contingency plan stalking the streets. But also, it isn’t. Punt a zombie’s head off its shoulders across from the public basketball court- over the fence, off the backboard, hear the swish, nothing but net.

Raccoon City Punks has a foundational Cartoon Network aesthetic. The Ralph Bakshi wolf in sheep’s clothing design, old school Harvey style spun out into something so sick that it calls into question who this story is supposed to be for. Scheidt and Mac reach back to visual gags of old, the physical impossibilities of early Looney Tunes cartoons, the squirty body humor of Mad Magazine. But rounder, and more Dexter and Gumball-coded. Mac is creating comics in a world where Mighty Mouse and Nickelodeon and Adventure Time are the past, not the future.

Seems like a much simpler way of saying “a kids’ comic not for kids” is to call it “a comic.” I’m not supposed to want this stuff in my funnybooks? It’s not like Mac lacks artistic sophistication because his style is cartoonish. I think he might understand what the De Luca Effect was for better than the majority of artists who employ it. Sometimes Punks has it in its commonly recognized use, a big map shot where the kids skate an obstacle-laden path of city streets. But Mac also uses it for gags that need to move faster than panels. Action, too. And skateboarding as a flow- rather than a series of tricks- hits different when the moments aren’t cut off from each other in little boxes of isolated instance. A lot of comics get trapped in thinking of the panel as the lens through which the scene is being perceived; Raccoon City Punks is rawer.

Speaking of being very comics, the sound effects in Raccoon City Punks really do do it all. Plenty of BOOM, FWIP, and KRAK (think a skateboard breaking), as well as plenty of Don Martin SPLOOT and SPLAT to double down on the gristle goop that is part of the Resident Evil appeal. But! There’s also a bunch of my favorite, the elevated sequential arts solution of sage cartoonists, doing what only comics can: when the character throws up ice cream and blood the onomatopoeia is VOMIT, kicks off the zombie’s head to the sound of PUNT!

The sounds and words combine in my head in a way that doesn’t exist elsewhere. It’s funny and absurd, and the kind of audience collaboration that only reading has. Within, you can hear what the unspeakable sounds like. And eating shit on asphalt to the sound of BEEF, that’s Shakespeare through and through.

Is that what makes this not for kids? Not the sophistication- the sploots? There’s gore, but it’s the kind of ropey, goofy stuff that doesn’t seem to count on screen. Everybody’s packed full of guts like a joke shop nut can of snakes. Leon’s being a low bottom, red weed burning stoner? Gonna go out on a limb and say this isn’t the first time video games and drugs have come into contact. Seems like an underdeveloped hill to die on. Speaking of, cursing. Is that indecent, or funny? Do we want kids to learn the difference between what is funny and what isn’t? ACAB includes the cop in your head. I’m sure this is fine for kids.

Scheidt has done some quite successful YA comics, but it’s DIY here in full force, despite the author’s foothold in the established world of publishing. Punks is clearly a labor of love, getting made in a palpably home-brew handmade way, instead of dealing with running the book through the publication machine. Raccoon City Punks is spiral-bound (red, an incredible no-brainer design choice)! Thick, boardy, duochromatic pages directly from the Riso machine. Gradient coloring (assisted by longtime collaborator Aaron Pittman) takes to the hardware like the CRT effect on pixels. There’s a tactile weight and presence of process that makes the reader conscious of the book as bespoke. Charmingly non-pro and yet excessively bohemian.

It’s the kind of fan comic that needs DIY, probably. Riffing on an established franchise can be tricky. No way this comic gets all its samples cleared (so to speak) if it has to start as a pitch to rights owners, or however this kind of thing gets walked up through mainstream channels. Editors? Do the comics publishers who put out Capcom content still employ editors? This is too much DGAF for that scene. So what we get instead is as goofy as it wants to be. No filter. No problem.

Which is how you want your fan- or even (sigh) licensed IP- comics to be. If you took away the direct references, it would still be a fun, weird, original little romp of a blood-soaked horror story. Sheidt and Mac were inspired, and something new came of that. Godzilla MISC made me feel this way. Art students Scooby-Doo a venture capital company and there’s Minilla? Raccoon City Punks is all about the three scrappy kids, looking out for each other and searching for animal chin. Resident Evil 2 is the icing.

So then being able to pull references and then spin them, this becomes a locus of nerd bliss for those who know. Like, literally spin them. Mr. X grabs a Licker by the tongue and spins it around his head like a Terrible Towel. You don’t have to know who/what these people/creatures/people-creatures(?) are like in the game to have a good time with Punks, but it helps. Scheidt and Mac have fun with the freedom to flip things wherever and however they see fit. The zombie dogs are unable to overcome their riot dog nature and end up siding with the punks instead of Umbrella. Because every good zombie world has its Bub, but also good boys.

We as contemporary comics readers are in a weird place, where fan comics show how an established legacy property has the capacity to inspire new, original storytelling, while much of what’s licensed is caged by a joyless, endless pursuit of new ways to self-reference. The heart in Punks isn’t effective expression of branding, it’s the kids. The punks. A big chunk of survival horror video games’ effectiveness is that it’s you experiencing it firsthand (sort of). Splooting your way out. Raccoon City Punks takes that away, creating a gap from disc to book, but Scheidt and Mac’s skaters clear it.

Raccoon City Punks is available from Dave Scheidt and wherever nicher comics and books are sold.