DCeased

/ Alex Good

Dceased

The first thing to note about this series is that it was late to the party. When Marvel Zombies started in 2005-2006 they were hitting the market at what I’ve called the moment of peak zombie. I was actually a bit surprised to see that DCeased (or DC Zombies) didn’t come out until 2019, long after the point when zombies had gone out of fashion. Though that didn’t stop the series from becoming a huge bestseller and spawning several sequels.

OK, technically these aren’t zombies. They’ve been infected with the Anti-Life Equation, which arrives on Earth as a sort of computer virus and starts turning people into undead creatures who go around biting chunks out of the living and so infecting them and turning them into . . . zombies. Apparently the equation spreads just as well by digital imagery as it does by infected blood. “I always suspected we’d have to destroy the Internet to save the world,” Green Arrow says. “I just didn’t know it would be like this.”

Batman figures all this out, and just to clear up any confusion gives us this quick fact check: “They’re not zombies. They’re not consumed by hunger. They’re not feeding. They’re spreading death. They’re stealing life. These are the anti-living.”

Oh, just stop already. This is DC Zombies. The zombie pathogen is a hybrid, both being a blood infection and spread through our phones like in the Pulse films or Stephen King’s Cell. We might almost say the virus is undergoing a cultural mutation, evolving from gene to meme.

Batman himself only figures all this out after he’s been infected, and later he’ll turn into one of the (ahem) “anti-living.” As will most of the rest of the DC pantheon. Yep, Batman, Green Lantern, Superman, the Flash, Wonder Woman. It’s up to the B-listers and a bunch of successors and superkids to save the day, which they do by loading the Earth’s uninfected onto space arks and heading out to Earth 2. Where the adventure will continue . . .

While I’ve called this DC Zombies, it’s actually hard to compare to Marvel Zombies. They’re both quite dark, obviously, but they feel different. Tom Taylor’s writing has less of Kirkman’s black humour, but I thought the storyline was more coherent. Which means that taken as whole I enjoyed the series a bit more. Though that isn’t a full endorsement, as I thought Marvel Zombies disappointing. I should also say that I read this in a “compact comic” edition. These are smaller format reprints (like the Marvel Masterworks volumes) so the art doesn’t have the same pop or impact and I sometimes had to strain to read the text. Even so, I liked the dark palette and Trevor Hairsine’s penciling.

Graphicalex

32 thoughts on “DCeased”

  3. Batman should go to the movies once in a while or read some classic horror. Then he’d realize that what we call “zombies” changes over time and he could spare us his contemporary biases. : -)

    Did you finish Cell? I’ve tried a couple times and just haven’t been able to do it.

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