Everything Dead & Dying

Everything Dead & Dying by Tate Brombal and Jacob Phillips is a collection of all five issues of the comic, which I had never read before, and I’m glad I read it as a collection because I don’t know how I would have done it if I’d had to wait between issues.

This book was grim but beautiful. We follow Jack Chandler, the only survivor in his whole town of a virus that turned everyone, including his husband and young daughter into zombies, but as long as they stay fed, their muscle memory (hand-wavy science) keeps them going through the motions of their routine from their last day alive.

So, every day, Jack goes through the routine of making pancakes, going through the day, and ending with telling Daisy the bedtime story of how he met her other father.

And the routine continues until it doesn’t, and as we all know,  the big problem with a zombie apocalypse isn’t the zombies, it’s the people.

All the events are intercut with Jack’s memories of his father disowning him and the general homophobia of the town, his coming out and eventual marriage and acceptance by some.

Everything Dead & Dying is not about a zombie apocalypse, it’s about what it means to live a life and how we grieve when that life’s over.

Thank you to NetGalley and Image Comics for the advance copy for my unbiased review. Pub. Date: 5/5/2026