Marvel has unleashed two zombie epics into comic book shops. The legendary director George Romero’s Empire of the Dead and Night of the Living Deadpool by Cullen Bunn.
The latest Merc With a Mouth limited series stars Wade Wilson in an undead apocalypse. Bunn tells Comic Book Resources how Romero’s film series and other zombie fiction influenced the new Deadpool story.
“In particular, Romero’s movies, with those meaty Tom Savini effects, but also “Return of the Living Dead” and Fulci’s “Zombie.” There was a time, as a young comic book reader, that I would have proclaimed “Deadworld” my favorite series. I’ve been lucky enough to run with the horror writer crowd and call many of them friends. Skipp and Spector’s “Books of the Dead” were huge influences on me as a writer. I was reading zombie novels like Brian Keene’s “The Rising” and “City of the Dead” when the zombie “craze” started kicking again. And, of course, I’ve written my share of zombie stories.
Here’s a quick one that I wrote during a horror writer’s meeting. We challenged ourselves to write a zombie story in less than a minute. This one is inspired my Monster Squad.
Dear army,
There are zombies.
Signed, the kid.
Dear kid,
We are zombies.
Signed, the army.
So, yes, all of those things are influences on me, and you’ll see nods to those stories and tropes in this book. That said, I tried to do something a little different with the zombies — something that would give them their own creepy flavor.”
George Romero’s Empire of the Dead #1 and Night of the Living Deadpool #1 are in stores now.
By Editor