What We Lost in the Zombie Apocalypse- thoughts on Everything Dead & Dying

Jack Chandler is trying to be a good family man— a good husband and an even better father. Even at the end of the world, he’s trying to be the man his family would have wanted him to be.  In Tate Brombal and Jacob Phillips’ Everything Dead & Dying, the world ended years ago in a zombie outbreak. Still, Jack is trying to live his life as if nothing happened in his small, remote Canadian village because, for some reason, the zombies are stuck repeating their last day over and over.  They’re not rampaging or searching for brains as long as Jack can keep them satisfied; his zombie husband and zombie daughter begin each day preparing breakfast just as they did in real life, and Jack welcomes that normality instead of facing the horrors that are all about him. They’re still zombies, but there’s something to the daily routine that Jack maintains with his family and the village that keeps their hunger at bay.  There’s no explanation for what’s happening here; Jack just accepts that it’s his responsibility to take care of his family and his neighbors in their undead state.  

Jack’s zombified domestic bliss is shattered when a group of survivors from another outpost finds his village and finds him protecting these zombies.  Brombal and Phillips flip the script on your typical zombie story (think The Walking Dead or 28 Days Later as examples of typical stories), where the zombies are a sign of the apocalypse.  If we try to look through Jack’s eyes, this story is about a man trying to protect the sick and suffering.  It’s not like he expresses hope to reverse their fate; he just finds some kind of comfort in the normality of his daily existence.  The story starts out feeling like a very empathetic story about a man trying to hold onto hope in the face of flesh-eating dread.  Trombal writes an opening chapter that’s a surprisingly grounded story about domestic life (the hopes and fears of it) as Phillips’ artwork captures a pastoral calmness not often seen in zombie stories.  But Trombal and Phillips' work also shows cracks in this reality, these flashes of horror that keep you on unsteady ground as you try to figure out just what Jack’s story is.  

Everything Dead and Dying seems like it’s going to be contrasting life before and after a pandemic, in this case, a zombie one.  It’s clear that Jack is living in a post-apocalyptic world, but he’s somehow the one person who’s able to hold onto hope and normality.  His husband and daughter are zombies, yet somehow he goes through the motions of having breakfast with them, of serving his community, and being able to be relatively unbroken in a broken world.  And then you realize that this is not that story.  

Like most zombie stories, this is about just how broken Jack and the world are.  

Phillips is the type of artist that’s as comfortable drawing horses as he is zombies (or at least, his art comes off that comfortably at home with both.)  He can create images that bring nature and horror together, so that here he can create a small town zombie story.  By placing the story in a small Canadian village, Phillips and Brombal can lean into what Jack is trying to hold onto.  Unlike other zombie stories that start with what was lost, this zombie story begins with what Jack has held onto during the apocalypse — the people and the daily activities that were just a part of his normal life, no matter how many years ago those were.  Even in the face of all of the devastation, Jack ignores all of that to try to live in the past.  And that gives us a view into Jack’s emotional state, all the effort and energy spent trying to mollify the zombies’ fateful hunger.

When another band of survivors disrupts Jack’s existence with the zombies, the peace that Jack has worked so hard to maintain reveals itself to be madness instead.  And it’s not just Jack’s madness that’s evident, but the world’s madness itself demonstrated by the other survivors who find Jack. At first, it’s easy to see Jack as the hero of this story, trying to protect the zombies from the invaders who want to eradicate them, which is an interesting twist on a zombie story.  But as Brombal and Phillips get deeper into the story, it becomes hard to see this as a story of good and evil.  Jack isn’t the good guy and the other survivors aren’t bad guys.  Instead, we see the world through all of these characters and the emotional and spiritual damage that’s been inflicted on them by a changing world.  

We all want the happy, normal moments but Brombal and Phillips explore the damaged and messy lives that we actually have.  While in 2026 it’s hard not to read zombie stories as Covid stories, Everything Dead & Dying harkens back to that feeling of normalcy that we all wanted even as we hunkered down in our houses, isolated, and fearing our neighbors.  It wasn’t a rational time and this isn’t a story about rationality.  All over the world, we were lost, wandering, and desperately trying to just be as normal as we could possibly be.  And we all went a little crazy in our isolation in ways that are probably still haunting us today.  We are all Jack here, just wanting breakfast with family members who were sick and dying.  We just want to hold onto the past as long as we can because the future is scary.