Tom Taylor’s zombified take on the DC Universe is finally winding to a close with DCeased 3 (or DC3ased, if you please), and the writer is keeping most of his cards pretty close to his chest. In addition to the original 6-issue miniseries in 2019, the DCeased franchise expanded to include the one-shot DCeased: A Good Day to Die, the three-part limited series DCeased: Unkillables and the 15-part digital-first anthology series DCeased: Hope at World’s End, as well as the sequel series DCeased: Dead Planet, before finally taking a break in early 2021.
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Taylor has done a number of projects for DC and elsewhere, but really got fans talking with his comics adaptation of the video game Injustice: Gods Among Us. Injustice, followed fairly soon after by DCeased, proved that Taylor is adept at deconstructing DC’s heroes through seemingly-nihilistic stories that actually manage to convey what makes them great. He has since gone on to work on titles like Nightwing and Superman: Son of Kal-El. But DCeased has been hanging over him, and the audience, for a while, feeling like it demanded a conclusion.
Along with the tagline “Every story has an end,” Taylor shared a caption of his own, seemingly a snippet of dialogue from the series: “This is not just survival. This is more.”
The conceit of DCeased is that the Anti-Life Equation is set loose on the DC Universe, causing a zombie-like plague that affects Earth’s heroes and villains. Fans figured that it was probably coming when, just before the official announcement, Taylor shared an image that read “Darkseid isn’t,” in the familiar white-on-black font of the “Darkseid is” panels from Tom King and Mitch Gerads’s Mister Miracle.
One benefit to being non-canon, while also being a big, universe-spanning epic, is that Taylor has had a chance to put his fingerprints on virtually every DC character during his time on DCeased, even playing with characters who had been largely absent since the start of The New 52. He also got to pair up new groups of characters who wouldn’t ordinarily spend time together, because zombie apocalypses make strange bedfellows. When else do you get to see the artist behind The Boys, for instance, draw Booster Gold and John Constantine hanging out?
DCeased 3 is coming along later this year from DC.
