Everything Dead and Dying #1 isn’t your typical zombie comic. I say this not out of hyperbole, but awe. Unlike the gritty drama that fueled The Walking Dead or the underlying mystery of Revival, this is a character piece first and foremost. The living dead are a part of it, but in a way the reader wouldn’t expect, and it’s utterly heart wrenching.
The opening of Everything Dead and Dying feels less like a horror comic and more like a neo-Western. Farmer Jack Chandler tells his daughter, Daisy, the story of how he met his husband, Luke, had her via surrogate, and managed to craft his own farm. Trouble strikes when the residents in Jack’s community start to contract a mysterious illness…and eventually become ravenous, rotting, flesh-eaters.
This setup is where creators Tate Brombal and Jacob Phillips zig where most zombie stories would zag. Rather than kill off the undead, Jack continues to live among them; chopping the heads off rotting chickens, saving flesh for his former neighbors to feast on, and continuing to tend to his farm. Brombal slowly unveils this new world, and gives readers a peak inside Jack’s head to showcase why he’s taking on a path that any other person would consider insane.
One of the moments that stands out is when Jack recalls his father showing him the entire view of their small town, and saying it was the entire world. Jack then reveals that his mother took him to the city, and it shook up his perceptions. “But my father wasn’t lying. Not really,” he muses. “No, to a man like him, what else was there? Just forests and farmland.” Brombal builds upon this line of thought, showing how Jack’s world has been contracted to the people in his community and how a zombie plague won’t change that.
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The writing in Everything Dead and Dying isn’t the only draw; Phillips, best known for his Criminal saga with Ed Brubaker, brings his simple yet striking style to the world of horror. Throughout the opening pages, Jack’s fairy tale to Daisy is punctuated with the harsh noise of a shovel digging deep into the Earth, finally culminating in a page where Jack kneels over an empty grave. If that weren’t enough, the colors by Pip Martin start to shift, growing from warm pastels and sunny skies to a blood red aura that heralds the rise of the undead. These are some truly terrifying zombies, as Phillips draws them with fiery red and black eyes and peeling flesh, accompanied by the disturbing sight of Aditya Bidikar’s twisted word balloons.
Phillips also shows the toll this is taking on Jack. When we first meet him, he’s a young, relatively strapping farmer. In the present, there’s bags under his eyes and stubble dotting his face – and a quiet desperation lingering over him. This sets up the final moments of the book, which threaten to upend the life Jack’s built for himself – or provide the salvation he didn’t know he needed. Either way, Everything Dead and Dying #1 is a breath of fresh air for the zombie genre, not to mention a truly gripping story.
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