[COLUMN] Marvel Zombies is Haunted by the MCU's Undead Continuity | by Darren Mooney

Note: This piece contains spoilers for the four episodes of Marvel Zombies that dropped on Disney+ this week. The show is… adequate. It does what it sets out to do. It’s very heavy on fan-service and continuity. But it is playful in its own weird way and demonstrates a clear affection for the source material. It also suffers from being animated in the somewhat limited What If…? style, which is not as expressive as one might want it to be. But if you’re not worried about spoilers, tuck right on in.

It is perhaps self-evident to observe that Marvel Zombies is a show about the undead, about those strange uncanny entities that exist in a liminal space between reality and oblivion. However, director Bryan Andrews and writer Zeb Wells are very engaged with the question of what it means for their characters to exist in a strange abstract space between more concrete states of being.

On the surface, Marvel Zombies is a fairly straightforward zombie apocalypse story. Building off an episode of the animated anthology What If..? and riffing on a very lucrative set of comics, Marvel Zombies unfolds in a branch of the larger Marvel Cinematic Multiverse where an undead plague has consumed Earth’s Mightiest Heroes and turned them into creatures that desperately crave flesh. There is an inherent perversity to the franchise – superheroes reduced to monsters.

If anything, Marvel Zombies downplays the horror of the source material. As created by Mark Millar and Greg Land for Ultimate Fantastic Four and as developed by Robert Kirkman and Sean Phillips for their own spin-off series, the monsters in the comics tend to retain warped versions of their own personalities. They are not simply mindless monsters, they are grotesque perversions of established characters and personalities.

The animated adaptation mostly drops this approach – allowing for rare exceptions like the Red Queen Wanda Maximoff (Elizabeth Olsen) and Okoye (Kenna Ramsey) – reducing familiar superheroes like Hawkeye, Captain America or Captain Marvel to silent specters skulking the eerie abandoned wasteland. This undoubtedly helped to keep costs under control for the animated series. When original generation heroes like Thor (Greg Fuhrman) do speak, they are voiced by new actors.

Despite the potential of an animated series to depict incredible and exciting surroundings, much of Marvel Zombies seems to unfold in the vast, grey, featureless voids that define so many modern mainstream blockbusters. Many of the show’s action beats unfold in either non-descript industrialized surroundings or wide open rocky plains. There is an emptiness to this world. It feels apocalyptic, but it also feels like a void, evoking the wide open “void” of Deadpool & Wolverine.

In Deadpool & Wolverine, building off of Loki, “the Void” served as a cosmic dumping ground for the loose ends of the vast multiverse of intellectual property owned by Marvel Studios. It was an apocalyptic wasteland, occupied by characters who had been “pruned” from the main timeline, such as Johnny Storm (Chris Evans) from the Tim Storey Fantastic Four movies or Pyro (Aaron Stanford) from the Bryan Singer and Brett Ratner X-Men movies.

Marvel Zombies does not literally take place in “the Void”, but it might as well. It takes place in a broken and fallen world, a world that exists beyond the possibility of salvation. It is a world that “has been declared condemned” by the intergalactic Nova Corps, who have imposed a quarantine around the planet. As they warn any would-be refugees from this hellscape, “Any attempt to flee the planet will be met with incineration.”

This world is – to reference one of the show’s favorite recurring visual motifs affecting both Riri Williams (Dominique Thorne) and Shang-Chi (Simu Liu) – a gangrenous limb. There is no cure. There is only quarantine and containment. At one point, Blade (Todd Williams) muses that the wide open space in which a zombified Captain Marvel is locked in endless perpetual conflict with the Eternal Ikaris is known as “the Valley of the Broken Gods”, but that term could apply to the entire world.

Marvel Zombies arrives at a strange time for the Marvel Cinematic Universe. It is released in the long fallow period between the theatrical releases of The Fantastic Four: First Steps and Avengers: Doomsday, the longest gap between theatrical releases since the pandemic. Of course, there will be other streaming releases in that lacuna – the long-delayed Wonder Man and the second season of Daredevil: Born Again – but it is something of a dead zone for the franchise.

One of the interesting aspects of the big upcoming crossover event is that it doesn’t really feel like the culmination or the conclusion to a story that Marvel Studios have been telling since Avengers: Endgame. Avengers: Doomsday and Avengers: Secret Wars are built around returning elements, but very few of the dozens of hours of entertainment that Marvel Studios have produced since the culmination of the Infinity Saga in Endgame.

Instead, Doomsday and Secret Wars are leaning hard on the return of star Robert Downey Jr. and directors Joe and Anthony Russo. There are rumors that Chris Evans will also return. The films will feature a gigantic crossover with the old Fox X-Men franchise, bringing back actors like Alan Cumming and Rebecca Romijn. It is reported that, in Doomsday, the Avengers will be led by Reed Richards (Pedro Pascal), who is not even part of the mainstream Marvel Cinematic Universe.

This, understandably, raises a variety of questions about what exactly is going to happen to the various characters and plot threads introduced in the dozens of projects released since Endgame. Will the audience ever see G'iah (Emilia Clarke) from Secret Invasion again? What was up with that Starfox (Harry Styles) cameo at the end of Eternals? Will viewers ever get to see Dane Whitman (Kit Harrington) become the Black Knight? Or will those threads be left dangling in the upcoming “reset?”

Marzel Zombies is haunted by the ghost of what might have been, but now likely never will be. The opening episode leans heavily on a trio of young heroines – Kamala Khan (Iman Vellani), Kate Bishop (Hailee Steinfeld) and Riri Williams – that many audience members suspected were being set up as the future of the shared universe, a sort of “Young Avengers” team. That seems unlikely to happen now. Kamala ends up serving as effectively the lead character of the four-episode series.

Kamala crosses paths with characters orphaned by the various shifts in the direction of the larger franchise. She teams up with Shang-Chi, another character who debuted after Endgame. Shang-Chi starred in a well-received and financially successful blockbuster, but feels like he has been abandoned. He has not appeared his is solo movie. There is no sequel in development. Director Daniel Destin Crettin has moved on to making Spider-Man: Brand New Day at competitor Sony.

Along the way, Kamala crosses paths with the vampire hunter known as Blade, another character caught in continuity limbo. Two-time Academy Award winner Mahershala Ali has long been attached to a Blade reboot, and even made a voice cameo at the end of Eternals. However, Marvel has struggled to realize that project, to the point that it became a joke in Deadpool & Wolverine. When Blade appears in Marvel Zombies, he is styled like Ali, but is not voiced by him.

There are other dangling plot threads woven through Marvel Zombies. Blade has become host to the Egyptian deity Khonshu (F. Murray Abraham), explaining that “his avatar was lost in a plague.” He is, by inference, referring to Marc Spector (Oscar Isaac), another character introduced in the wake of Endgame who seemed important at the time, but who it turns out might not have a long-term future with the company.

With this in mind, it is perhaps notable that the most important of the classic Avengers characters to appear in heroic role in Marvel Zombies, in terms of screen time and plot importance, are Spider-Man (Hudson Thames) and the Hulk. These two characters are, in their own way, refugees from continuity. Spider-Man has been licensed to Sony and the Hulk has a deal whereby any solo Hulk movie would require buy-in from Universal.

As such, there is an interesting subtext simmering through Marzel Zombies. In many ways, it feels like something approaching an Avengers movie for the characters who probably should be at the center of the next two Avengers movies, but are likely to be marginalized for the return of Robert Downey Jr. and Chris Evans. Indeed, it feels strangely appropriate that the series pits these newer characters against the empty shuffling shells of the older and more established heroes.

At times, Marvel Zombies feels like an attempt to give Kamala and Blade (and perhaps even Shang-Chi) the Avengers movie that they deserve but are unlikely to ever receive. The show is structured so that its action beats recall other Avengers moments. The first episode climaxes with a big battle in an empty field, recalling Avengers: Infinity War, Black Panther or Avengers: Endgame. The second episode opens with urban devastation recalling The Avengers or Avengers: Age of Ultron.

To underscore this point, the third episode even opens with an extended zombified riff on the climax of Infinity War, with Spider-Man narrating a zombified Thanos’ attack Wakanda – complete with last-minute arrive of Thor, Rocket Raccoon and Groot. The series repeatedly emphasizes that the zombie apocalypse happened “five years ago”, underscoring the extent to which Marvel Zombies exists as a branch from the end of the Infinity Saga.

Marvel Zombies feels – both within the text and outside it – like another example of this year’s media about abandoned children. Kamala pleads with Thor to help them. “You’re the last Avenger,” she begs. “We need you.” Thor replies, “No, little one. You’re the Avenger now.” Kamala has been put in this position of incredible stress with no support. As she tells Spider-Man, “I asked all of you to follow me - to give up everything on the chance we could fix things.” That’s a lot to put on a kid.

In some ways, Marvel Zombies is a celebration of the characters and threads that have been established and abandoned in the confusion of “the Multiverse Saga.” These are heroes who were introduced with the promise that they represented the future of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, only to find themselves marginalized for cheap nostalgia. Marvel Zombies plays as an allegory for these characters exiled from continuity, cast into some undead world as their future is taken from them.

Like the weird quasi-continuity-reboot of James Gunn’s DC Universe, this feels like another illustration of how these superhero franchises are becoming more like comic books as they run longer and amass more complicated continuity. Comic book history is full of these sorts of aborted arcs and characters stuck in limbo – arcs that began moving in one direction, but ended up truncated or abridged or erased by outside forces. Think of it as zombie storytelling. Not finished, but not alive.

Comic book history is full of such dead ends. The Inhumans were originally supposed to replace the mutants, until Disney bought Fox and so reclaimed the theatrical rights to the X-Men franchise. Gambit was originally supposed to be revealed to be the secret third brother of Cyclops and Havok, until Chris Claremont departed the X-Men titles. Marv Wolfman introduced “the Sky-Walker” in a short arc of Daredevil as a potential big bad, only for the character to vanish from continuity.

It is perhaps fitting that Marvel Zombies ends much the same way that Ironheart did, with its teenage female protagonist effectively taking a deal with the devil. As the world explodes around her, Kamala surrenders to Wanda. She embraces the alternate fantasy world that Wanda creates where she can be reunited with Kate and Riri. After all, trapped in the ruins of a dying and forgotten world haunted by zombified nostalgia, who wouldn’t retreat into fantasy?