Cover Story : The Living Dead

It’s not every day that you get a project like The Living Dead. Not only are several of us big zombie fans, but The Living Dead: The Beginning is George Romero’s first work of trade fiction. Jeff Miller and I were excited to get our hands dirty…bloody…what have you.

We really wanted to create a version of a zombie that hadn’t been seen before. Let’s be honest; the traditional view of a lumbering, moaning, shuffling zombie has been replaced by high energy, fully upright rage machines, especially in recent flicks like Dawn of the Dead and 28 Days Later. Like it or not, the athletic zombie has become the standard, and this is how we decided to present this book (at least on a few of the options).

Using stock photography was not a direction we wanted to go for this. All of the images we researched were either (a) extremely cheesy (b) inexplicable or (c) just really really awful. We decided to work with Steve Gardner (over at Pixelworks Studios) to try and get our vision across. Below are some of the outtakes (after some significant photoshop work):

We were very pleased with the initial results. Having used very lo-tech solutions for the zombies (we made blood using food coloring and peanut butter for Pete’s sake), it was a blast to go into the design process armed with some custom images.

Below are some of the designs we came up with:

Here’s a detail of the type. We used paint and some canned air to blow the ink around:

Ultimately, the publisher went a different direction, and none of these comps were used. However, they were a ton of fun to work on, and the images will hopefully scare me and my studio mates for a long time to come.