In this review of Everything Dead & Dying #1, we enter into a new world of the living and the dead, but not quite like the ones we’ve seen before.
Everything Dead & Dying #1
Writer: Tate Brombal
Art and Main Cover: Jacob Phillips
Variant Covers: Jacob Phillips, Charlie Adlard
Page Count: 40 pages
Release Date: September 3, 2025
This review contains spoilers
Everything Dead & Dying #1 opens with the main character, Jack, telling his daughter, Daisy, a bedtime story about a farmer. The story turns out to be Jack’s own life, giving us a quick backstory, as well as an introduction to another one of the characters, Luke, Jack’s husband. It cuts back and forth between Jack’s bedtime tale and flashes of a nightmare.
The use of color to delineate this interplay is excellent. Bright colors for the story, dark colors for the nightmare, but with a mix in between at certain times as the pages turn.
We discover that the setting is a place called Caverton, a rural and quiet little town. Jack has a house he built on a hill overlooking the area and has a farm not far away. We see him tending his farm, doing the usual farm tasks like milking the cow, checking the crops, feeding the pigs. Everything looks pretty normal, other than the nightmares. We don’t have to wait long for that illusion to dissolve.
Halfway through Everything Dead & Dying #1, we find out that a virus came along, made everyone sick, and quickly changed them into the undead. All, that is, except for Jack. For some reason, he was spared the same fate, likely due to natural immunity.
Here’s where the twist to the usual zombie apocalypse tale kicks in. Rather than fight off the zombies, Jack turns into their caretaker. As long as he feeds them a steady diet of flesh and blood, the formerly living just go about their same routine as when they were last alive. This includes Luke and Daisy, thus giving Jack a reason to farm. He has to keep his loved ones “alive” because nobody else is around to do it. He can’t let go of them, so he does what he has to do to make it another day.
We also find out a little about Daisy’s mother, Liz, as the flashbacks continue. This aspect of the story is so well done by writer Tate Brombal. The blending of the past and current timelines carries Everything Dead & Dying #1 all the way through to the last page, when we find out that Jack isn’t the only living person left in the area in an explosive way. It ends on that cliffhanger, setting us up for the next issue. Are these people friend or foe? No idea, but that’s the beauty of this new world. There are so many avenues to take, we have no way to know which way it will go.
From this opening chapter, we get glimpses of what the overall story is about. We’ve got a main character who has felt like an outcast his whole life and just wants to lead a simple life with the people he loves, but obstacles get in the way. He has been and will be forced to deal with people who don’t accept him and the goals he has in life. These are ideas that many readers may be able to identify with and are very much relevant to the world we live in. The fact that it just so happens to be set in a world where the dead come back to life is extra flavor for horror comic lovers.
Cover / interior art by artist Jacob Phillips and colorist Pip Martin is beautiful. The cover captures the story with a muted color palette, giving it an old-time feel. Pages range from multi-panel to splash. For horror lovers, there is plenty of gore.
Final Thoughts
Back in 2003, Image Comics brought us one of the most successful zombie apocalypse stories ever in the form of The Walking Dead. Can they do it again? That remains to be seen, but this new world of the living dead is off to a good start with Everything Dead & Dying #1.
