Marvel Zombies: The Day the Heroes Ate the World
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Some comics ask you to look up at the heroes. Marvel Zombies asks what happens when they look down at you and get hungry.
Written by Robert Kirkman, who was deep into The Walking Dead at the time, and drawn by Sean Phillips, this 2005-06 miniseries drops us into an alternate Earth where a strange virus has turned the entire superhero community into flesh-eating undead. Spider-Man, Wolverine, the Hulk, Captain America and the rest of the Marvel pantheon have already eaten their way through the planet's population when the story begins. What's left is a handful of ravenous, still weirdly chatty superheroes who have run out of people to eat.
The surprise is how funny and grim it is at once. Kirkman gives the infected heroes their old voices and old habits, so you get familiar banter, guilt and bickering while they're in the middle of a feast. It's gleefully gross, but the real horror is the loss of everything these characters used to stand for. The hunger wins, and they know it.
Phillips draws the carnage with a gritty, noir-tinged realism that's the perfect counterweight to the cartoonish premise, and Arthur Suydam's covers, twisted riffs on classic Marvel cover art, are worth the price of admission on their own. The story is tight and fast, and it builds to a final stretch that is outrageous even by the book's own standards.
It spawned sequels, prequels and crossovers, but the original is still the one to start with: mean, macabre and a real blast for anyone who grew up on capes and now wants to see them rot.
PAIR IT WITH The Misfits' Walk Among Us, a blast of horror-punk that sounds like a B-movie matinee gone feral. Play it loud.