Everything Dead & Dying
When most people think of Robert Kirkman’s zombie apocalypse story The Walking Dead, they likely remember two aspects of the show. The first is, of course, the zombies (or “walkers,” as they were called on the show). Everpresent and always hungry, they drove much of the story’s survival narrative. The second aspect, and perhaps the secret of the show’s popularity, was its non-zombie characters, humans who once had jobs, families, and lives before society collapsed and are now stuck simply trying to survive this new, deadly world. Everything Dead & Dying, a zombie apocalypse tale by writer Tate Brombal and illustrated by Jacob Phillips, shows Kirkman’s legacy throughout its DNA, even as it makes a subtle but poignant tweak to his formula.
The series focuses on Jack Chandler, the lone survivor of a zombie outbreak that has decimated the community and is consuming the world, but Jack cares little about the outside world. All he cares about is the community that had once welcomed him and the husband and daughter he loves. Despite the fact that they are zombies, he still treats them like human beings. He makes sure his zombified husband and daughter eat at the dinner table and that the members of their community, despite showing minimal awareness, are able to still go about the routines they performed while alive. Jack is able to maintain this precarious pantomime of existence until a group of survivors come to his community to “rescue” Jack by destroying all the zombies that were his family and friends.
Brombal’s zombie tale might seem like a lot of other zombie apocalypse stories that came before it, but he adds his own spin. The story takes place between two narratives, before the zombie outbreak and after. The reader is introduced to these characters as living, breathing human beings with personalities before showing them in their current undead state, sometimes on the same comic page. Readers also see these people accept Jack’s lifestyle when his own father doesn’t, which makes their zombified state even more tragic. Salt is finally poured into the emotional wounds when the book delves into Jack’s time with his husband Luke, revealed to be a man who was many times Jack’s anchor, and his daughter Daisy, a precocious child whom he loved dearly. In other zombie stories, the zombies are seen mostly as obstacles or environmental dangers; Brombal forcefully reminds readers that these zombies with a taste for human flesh were once human.
That isn’t to say that the book ever downplays the fact that these zombies eat human flesh. Phillips’s art showcases the dichotomy between the community pre and post zombie apocalypse. Many of his panels are bursting with reds, showcasing blood and viscera no longer contained by human skin. The zombies definitely look like zombies, with skin sloughing off and mouths and clothes stained red from previous meals. However, the realistic way Phillips illustrates human faces and anatomy hammers home the similarities and differences between these people when they were alive versus after they became zombies. Finally, Philips’s rural landscapes evokes a bucolic rural existence, even if that existence becomes a grim, bloody parody of itself.
This book should be resting in the same section as Kirkman’s The Walking Dead and other horror graphic tales that skew toward adults. It offers enough gnarly illustrations to attract graphic novel gorehounds, but the story is a tragic, heartbreaking tale of a man who’s trying to hold onto his humanity by helping his community hold onto theirs. Like The Walking Dead, this book ultimately asks how long a person can remain human when so much of humanity has become inhuman.
Everything Dead & Dying
By Tate Brombal
Art by Jacob Phillips
Image, 2026
ISBN: 9781534332539
NFNT Age Recommendation: Adult (18+)
