Empire of the Dead and the Marvelization of George A. Romero

When horror master George A. Romero first announced that he was going to write a zombie comic for Marvel, one of the first questions was whether it might be set in the Marvel Universe.After all, the logic went, we’ve already had Robert Kirkman’s hot-selling Marvel Zombies, the success of which was key to raising awareness of The Walking Dead in that series’ early days. Would Romero do something like that? Could it involve superheroes? Would it be in continuity?Ultimately, the answer to all of those was no, as Romero and Marvel later revealed that the premise of Empire of the Dead would be vampires versus zombies with humanity caught in the middle (not entirely unlike Max Brooks’s Avatar Press series The Extinction Parade).