As Marvel Studios marketed the first season of its multiverse-hopping canonical animated series, What If…?, it smartly leaned heavily into the show’s most eye-popping premise: zombies. The earliest teasers for the series put zombie Cap front and center, along it clear that at least in that episode, nobody was safe from the zombie apocalypse.
As it turned out, the attempt by Earth’s Mightiest Heroes to take down the zombies infected with a Quantum Virus in “What If…Zombies?!” led to an even greater catastrophe; however, the silver lining for fans of zombies–and the gratuitous violence that comes with them–was 30 minutes of TV-MA of spectacularly gory fun in the kind of kill-or-be-killed environment that was more akin to Mortal Kombat than anything. And, like many episodes of What If…?, “What If…Zombies?!” left the door open for more stories to be told…
…the creative team behind What If…? ran with it like they were designing Mortal Kombat fatalities. The episode included two particularly bad cases of being cut in half (Sam Wilson and Steve Rogers were bisected longitudinally and transversely, respectively); Wong continued the trend of librarians from Kamar-Taj being relieved of their heads; and Hope van Dyne got especially nasty, using ants to strip the flesh from Ebony Maw, Cull Obsidian and Doctor Strange before decapitating Iron Man, repulsoring Happy in the face and then growing to full size inside a zombified Sharon Carter, resulting in a real gross mess.
-‘WHAT IF… ZOMBIES?’ Is the Closest To ‘MORTAL KOMBAT’ The MCU May Get
Four years later, Marvel Animation’s Marvel Zombies returns to the alternate Earth overrun by Quantum zombies to spin a classic zombie yarn bringing together disparate groups of survivors. While the zombie horde prevented Thanos’ plans from coming to fruition, it ultimately unleashed an even greater threat in Wanda Maximoff, the Queen of the Dead, who doesn’t have a 50% off the population of the Earth coupon but rather and army of undead who see the population as an all-you-can-eat buffet.
Frenetic, savage and gadgety-on-the-brink-of-gimmicky, Marvel Zombies ends up a bit less than the sum of its parts while still managing to deliver a sinewy supernatural survivor story.
Picking up where “What If…Zombies?!” left off, Marvel Zombies spends three episodes bringing together its main cast while explaining and expanding upon the situation they’re trying to survive in the ravenous, post-apocalyptic environment which creators Bryan Andrews and Zeb Wells leverage to their full narrative advantage. From the North Institute to The Raft and plenty of surprising people, places and things, the four-episode TV-MA mini-event is weaved on an impressively vast narrative canvas that is incredibly inclusive. Ultimately, Marvel Zombies is Kamala Khan’s story–and Iman Vellani once again does an amazing job–though there’s plenty for others to do outside of die.
On that note, Simu Liu‘s Shang-Chi and Awkwafina’s Katy Chen, who are at ground zero of the outbreak in San Francisco, get a fun new origin story that shows off the fun that can be had exploring these What If…? universes. And it involves a truly all-time great zombie apocalypse moment that sits right there with 28 Days Later and World War Z. Ultimately, it’s moments like this (which takes place at the begining of Episode 2) and Spider-Man being turned loose as a zombie-killing machine that make Marvel Zombies worth the watch, even if it is a bit flawed in its narrative and does leave some continuity questions even in an alternate timeline.
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