Hi everyone! I hope you’re all well. Today is Friday, and it’s time for another review. Today, I’m sharing my thoughts on the comic/graphic novel ‘Everything Dead & Dying’ by writer Tate Brombal and artist Jacob Phillips.

Everything Dead & Dying is from Image Comics. It was released in May 2026 and is 176 Pages.

The Plot
Jack is the only person somehow still surviving (if you can call it that) in his small farming town after a zombie uprising. However, instead of eradicating the zombies, he lives with them, feeding and tending them like livestock, including his husband, Luke and their daughter, Daisy.

But then outsiders arrive, and the fragile thing Jack has built starts to come apart.

Characters
Jack Chandler
Jack is the heart of the book and one of the most quietly devastating protagonists I’ve read in a horror comic. He isn’t the gun-wielding survivalist the zombie genre usually serves up. He’s a farmer, a husband, a father, and his “heroism” is really a kind of refusal to accept what’s happened. Watching him insist on the routines of a life that’s already ended is unbearable in the best way.

Luke Chandler,
Luke is Jack’s husband and appears in both the story’s flashbacks, where he is alive and loving, and in the present, where he is stumbling, mindless and gone. The flashbacks make his absence sting; the way Jack still talks to him in the now makes it worse.

Daisy Chandler
Daisy is their adopted daughter, and that’s the gut-punch. There’s a recurring moment where Jack quizzes her on animal sounds: “What does a duck say?”, providing you all you need to know about who he used to be and who he is still trying to be.

The Outsiders
The outsiders function less as villains and more as the inevitable. They’re survivors doing what survivors are “supposed” to do in a zombie apocalypse: they’re wiping out the zombies, which puts them on a collision course with Jack’s whole worldview.

Writing Style
What stuck with me most about Brombal’s script is how domestic it is. So much of the dialogue is just small, ordinary stuff — meal times, chores, the things parents say to children on autopilot — and the horror grows directly out of the fact that Jack is still saying them.

That texture extends to the supporting characters, too. The outsiders, when they arrive, talk like real people in a real situation, not like genre stereotypes. There are no monologues, no big philosophical exchanges about what humanity means now. Everyone sounds realistic, and the book is far more wrenching for it.

The dual timeline structure is another masterstroke. Past and present don’t just alternate; they sort of rhyme. A gesture, a phrase, a routine repeated in completely different circumstances. Brombal plants these echoes carefully and lets them do their work without underlining them.

One other thing Brombal does wonderfully is end scenes early. Just slightly before you expect them to resolve. It’s a small craft choice that builds an enormous amount of unease across the book — you’re always being asked to sit with something a beat longer than feels comfortable — and by the end, that accumulated discomfort has become something like dread.

Artwork
Jacob Phillips’s work is nothing short of brilliant here. His linework has a loose, sketchy, lived-in quality — Jack’s face alone carries scenes with almost no dialogue. As both artist and colourist, Phillips controls the entire atmosphere of the book, and he uses that control brilliantly: the past glows in vibrant tones and soft light, the present sits in something sickly and drained, and the colour temperature changes so gradually you barely notice it happening until you flip back and compare.

Final Thoughts
Overall, this is a story about grief disguised as a zombie story, which is a hard thing to pull off. If you’re bored with zombies and the undead, this is the one to read, and even if you’re not, still give it a go. Brombal and Phillips have made something genuinely moving out of a genre that’s been wrung out, and its 2026 Eisner nomination for Best Limited Series is richly deserved.

I’m giving this one a full 10/10.

Have you read this one? What did you think?

As ever, thanks for stopping by!

Until next time,

George

© 2026 GLT

Categories: Book Reviews, Reading

Tags: book review, Comic, gay, graphic novel, horror, LGBTQ, review, zombies