Racks and Stacks - Escape of the Living Dead: Airborne

In the Racks and Stacks series, Cody discusses the comic books he has been reading.

The zombie plague continues to spread!

After collaborating on Night of the Living Dead, director/writer George A. Romero and co-writer John A. Russo took their zombie stories in different directions. As Romero explored the concept of a zombie apocalypse in further films, Russo went with the idea that the authorities managed to get the zombie outbreak under control at the end of Night of the Living Dead. The zombie outbreak was taken care of and the corpses of the living dead incinerated. In 2005, Russo teamed with comic book publisher Avatar Press to bring one of his Night follow-up stories, Escape of the Living Dead, to the pages of a five-issue limited series. That series was successful that in August of 2006, just five months after Escape of the Living Dead finished its run, the first issue of the three-part sequel Escape of the Living Dead: Airborne hit store shelves.

Like its predecessor, this one is based on a story conceived by Russo that was then translated into a comic book script by Mike Wolfer. Penciler Dheeraj Verma, inker Lalit, and colorist Andrew Dalhouse returned to handle the artwork.

Set in 1971, three years after the zombie plague swept across Pennsylvania (and the eastern third of the United States), Escape of the Living Dead let us know that most of the zombies were put down and destroyed, but the government ordered that some of them be captured, as they wanted to study the ghouls and find a cure to the zombie sickness. Some of those captured zombies ended up at the Melrose Medical Research Center just outside of Pittsburgh, a place headed up by Doctor Melrose. That research center was shut down in the previous story, but Melrose and his son went on the run with some zombie subjects, and in Airborne, they have the hippie zombie “Deadhead,” who was a visual standout in Escape, chained up in a meat locker so they can continue studying him. He seems to be more intelligent that the average zombie, which might be attributed to the fact that he took LSD before he died and had Agent Orange in his system.

You won’t be shocked to see that Deadhead does not spend this entire three-issue series in chains – but his escape is not what’s primarily responsible for the new zombie outbreak in this story. Airborne explores an idea that I’ve occasionally wondered about, but have never seen addressed in a movie: the idea that the zombie infection could be spread through mosquito bites.

The main characters here are a group of hippies who have their own bus and were on a road trip to California before their vehicle got bogged down in a swamp outside of Pittsburgh. While some of them try to figure out how to get back on the road, most of them decide to spend their time skinny-dipping and hooking up in the forest. There is gratuitous nudity splashed all over the pages of this book, as these hippies do not like to keep their clothes on for very long. They’re into free love and orgies. Unfortunately for them, there’s a leftover zombie stuck in the swamp as well – and when mosquitoes that have been feeding on that zombie also bite nearby humans, the infection spreads, and soon enough we have zombies roaming the Pennsylvania countryside all over again, munching on as much warm, living human flesh as they can sink their teeth into.

And with all these naked hippies around – yes, they do show a zombie taking a bite out of someone’s ass.

With so many characters who are written in very similar ways, given that most of them are quite like-minded individuals, it can be difficult to tell the hippies apart. I can say that they have names like Sage, River, Moon, Scorpio, Dove, Apollo, Mercury, Thunder, Starlight, Taffy, Adonis, Fawn, E.C. (a tribute to E.C. Comics, the company that brought us books like Tales from the Crypt), and Captain Trips (a nod to Stephen King’s The Stand), but most of them don’t really stand out and are just then to get eaten by zombies. That’s fine, because the zombie action is fun to look through. And that's enough to make Airborne a fun read.

The story of Deadhead would be expanded with two one-shot comics, Escape of the Living Dead: Fearbook and Escape of the Living Dead Annual, then the whole series collected in a trade paperback called Escape of the Living Dead: Resurrected.

Note: Marvel Comics will not be covered in Racks and Stacks articles, as they have their own article series.