What To Read If You Liked Marvel's What If... Zombies?
by: Steven McGee
With the latest episode of What If…? being based on Marvel’s Zombies I just had to check out the comic run. The episode was too intriguing not to dig deeper and find out more about this from a reader's standpoint. I’m not sure who came up with the thought of how can we do something that Marvel has never done before? The great thing about the Zombie catalog is that they are non-binding. Meaning that you may lose your favorite hero in this series but in the next series of Zombies, your hero will more than likely return.
Unlike regular Zombie stories, the zombies in their stories keep their intellect. They aren’t mindless idiotic walking pieces of flesh. The fight against the undead is so much more interesting given this dynamic. We see heroes use their powers and even after becoming Zombies. They even still search to find a cure for everything that’s going on. While trying to figure out things they sometimes give in to their “hunger”. There is even a situation where all the characters get together and tell The Hulk that he is eating too much, in which he responds by splattering the head of Thanos and saying, “he will eat his portion”.
Zombie apocalypses seem to spread rapidly. In the Marvel universe, they have a cool explanation of how it spread. We see Scarlet Witch surrounded by zombies and the speedster Quicksilver swoops in to save his sister. The twist is that it isn’t his sister. It’s a zombie Mystique in disguise and she takes a chomp out of Quicksilver. Now imagine a speedster as a zombie. Yea that is all you need to know on how this Zombie apocalypse spread and spread fast! A world with a zombie speedster is just plain unfair. I don’t know about you guys out there but I’m a lot of things, fast isn’t one of them.
We also get to see a character in which I knew absolutely nothing about let alone knew was in the Marvel universe. Ash Williams from Ash vs Evil Dead. Maybe I’m just clueless but I had no idea that the comedy shows and movies about zombies were all intertwined into the Marvel Zombie series. It felt so fresh to see a different character get some shine that I didn’t know I needed. Speaking of characters that I didn’t know I needed to see in a Marvel zombie story. Deadpool! We get to follow Zombie Deadpool around and I absolutely loved it. An undead Deadpool is everything you think it is.
I won’t go into much detail but if you get a chance especially with spooky season right around the corner Marvels different zombie series are a must-read. I can’t express enough how much fun I had with this series and the episode of What If that we got last week was barely scratching the surface of what more is to possibly come. I need a separate tv-series asap. What a ride that did not disappoint.
From the C4S writer’s gallery, I give it a 4.2/5. With that being said we will see you guys on the next one.