Charlie Adlard is one of the most recognized comics artists around, thanks to his landmark work on The Walking Dead, defining generations of comic storytelling. Now, the artist is heading back into the apocalypse with a twist—thanks to a new series from Image Comics.
io9 can exclusively reveal your first look at Adlard’s stealth variant cover for the debut issue of Everything Dead & Dying, set to hit shelves this September. Written by Tate Brombal and with art from Jacob Phillips, the five-issue miniseries follows a man named Jack Chandler, the sole survivor of his rural farming community in the wake of a zombie apocalypse.
But rather than clear his world of the undead—which tragically includes his husband and their adopted daughter—Chandler has decided to keep living with and among the unliving. Instead of fighting off zombie hordes, Jack will find himself up against his fellow survivors when a group of outsiders discovers his home, willing to do anything to protect the last connections to his pre-apocalypse life from being put down for good. So open wide to look at Jack doing just that in Adlard’s cover for Everything Dead & Dying #1 below!
“This is a zombie story that I had never seen done before, so I set out to write it myself. What if a lone man continued to live alongside his undead, tended to them, kept them fed, and loved them like they were still alive… only for the cast of The Walking Dead to stroll into town and put that man’s entire world at risk,” Brombal teased to io9. “It’s about grief. It’s about morality and mortality in a fallen world. It’s about everything we owe to everything dead and dying.”
“I remember getting Charlie to do a sketch of me as a zombie, just like everybody else, around 20 years ago at a convention,” Phillips added. “So it felt only right we got Charlie ‘King of the Undead’ Adlard to do a cover for this book. And I think we can agree, he KILLED it.”
“The Walking Dead reshaped zombie fiction for the modern era and its influence is felt all over Everything Dead & Dying, so to get this blessing and passing of the torch from Charlie Adlard himself is nothing short of incredible,” Brombal concluded. “This is a definite career highlight for me, as someone who read and loved those comics so much growing up.”
Everything Dead & Dying #1 is set to hit shelves September 3.
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