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Nightmare Fuel / Marvel Zombies

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As this is a Moments page, all SPOILERS are unmarked per Spoilers Off. Read at your own risk.

  • The premise itself. Picture your heroes transformed into flesh eating monsters, who still remember their past lives. Coming for you, your families, eating every living being alive on Earth. They all have superpowers, they've defeated the militaries of the world. It can't be a pretty image.
  • "All the Avengers had a piece of Jarvis — he almost didn't fight it."
  • Not to mention how calmly Daredevil talks about looking for anyone hiding with an Avengers jet, in order to be mistaken for rescuers and therefore tricking survivors, making them come out on their own will.
  • When Magneto and Galactus get eaten, both have a separate page entirely dedicated to showing them being dismembered and each bite by each zombie in each panel, in a painfully accurate and graphic way. Let's just say that it's painful to watch— two of the most powerful and iconic villains in the Marvel universe, just being gruesomely torn apart and devoured like nothing. And in Dead Days, Nick Fury gets a similar treatment.
    • Oh, and if that's not enough— in Marvel Zombies 2, they do the same thing to Ego The Living Planet.
  • The covers are usually just Body Horror homages turning the original characters into rotten, oft-dismembered flesh. One of the Marvel Zombies 3 manages to be extra unsettling by being literally in your face, a close-up of a zombified head (expanding on the 28 Days Later poster, which just had two eyes).
  • The fate of Earth-Z's real Spider-Man. Sandman mistakes the classic Spider-Man as the zombified one that attacked/ate his Sinister Six teammates. Sandman brutally pummels the wallcrawler and then proceeds to force himself into his mouth and into his body. The last few panels have Spidey in pain until the inevitable kaboom. It's as worse seen than what it actually sounds.
  • After Magneto is eaten, Bruce Banner begins screaming that his stomach is going to explode after taking part in the consumption. Because he ate as The Hulk, his stomach could hold Magneto's body without issue. Now that he's shrunken down to Bruce Banner, Magneto's body is simply too big for his stomach and it eventually burst through.
  • The zombified Power Pack. Imagine being hunted down and eaten alive by zombie children. Of course, Nextwave's Black Comedy moment takes the seriousness of the situation away, but still...
    • The idea of the zombified Power Pack itself. Not even children are immune to being turned into ever-hungry zombies...
  • The concept of the zombie virus itself. You become a flesh-eating monster but still maintain your personality (although distorted by the Hunger); you are driven to do horrible things but, anytime you eat, you regain enough sanity to realize the horror and the guilt of what you are doing. You can resist the Hunger but it can also take little to fall back into it. It's more like a cruel demonic curse - and it actively seeks to spread itself.
    • And it cannot be stopped. When we say that pretty much every Marvel hero was infected, we're also taking into account Wolverine and the Hulk, who - bear in mind - have two of the strongest, most notorious healing factors of any non-divine characters in all of comics. If all the healing factor in the world can't save you from getting zombified, nothing else will.
    • Not even being a god or a god-like entity can keep you safe from the virus. Thor is unliving proof.
    • Not to mention that the virus itself is actively trying to spread. Given enough time, your only goal will be to spread the Hunger Gospel. And there's nothing you can do to stop it.
    • Sometimes, the Gospel seems disturbingly intelligent and calculated in how it spreads itself. Zombie Mystique disguises herself to infect Quicksilver, who then uses his speed to travel the world infecting every hero he can find, something that would make sense as the virus itself trying to remove and convert as much resistance as possible.
    • What's even more disturbing is that there is an implication that the virus can't even control itself. In Marvel Zombies and Army of Darkness crossover, Beast says that they wanted to turn Charles Xavier but he was just too delicious. Thus instead of a bite to turn him, as the Fantastic Four did to Tony, he ended up devoured.
    • Lastly, there's the fact that in the original miniseries and "Dead Days", none of them are able to resist it. This isn't mind control; they maintain all of their mental faculties. All the great heroes of the Marvel Universe chose, however unwillingly, to start eating people alive.
  • The ways Spider-Man infects the Sinister Six. Here's the rundown: he pulls out Kraven's throat with his teeth, pushes Mysterio's brain out, eats Doctor Octopus's roasted guts, rips off Vulture's wings/arms in mid-air, and uses them to decapitate Electro. It goes on to show how the villains who behave as if they came straight out of the sixties would react to such a horrifying foe. Mysterio, in particular, is instantly terrified by Spider-Man's brutality but tries to hide it beneath a thin veil of bluster.
    • Oh, and Spider-Man doesn't use regular webbing - He's forgotten how. Instead, he uses his veins and arteries as webbing.
  • Black Panther's initial fate in the story definitely qualifies as an instance of And I Must Scream. The zombie Hank Pym keeps him in a sedated state, so he can amputate bits of him over time to eat, while still keeping him alive just so he can have someone to talk to. Black Panther eventually manages to escape, but not in one piece.
  • This line from Hank Pym in the first volume, showing us that even the zombies don't have it good:
    "You want to hear something really scary? Well, something that scares me, at least. I like the way flesh tastes. Really, I do. If I were to somehow find a cure for whatever's going on with us - if things went back to the way they were... or as close as they could get... I think I'd still eat people. That terrifies me. Really."
  • Hawkeye spent forty years as a head trapped under some rubble, unable to escape or talk to anyone. When he's left alone, he cries. When someone tried to take off his mask, he thought they were trying to rip off his face!
    • Hawkeye is rescued by an alliance of Earth heroes and D-list supervillains. Even with this, the human villains are still the most terrifying.
  • In Marvel Zombies 5 #4, Amadeus Cho and Delphyne Gorgon kiss the instant they get infected with the zombie technovirus. It gets messy.
    • Further, the source of the virus in that reality is Jocasta, who's normally an advocate of human-robot coexistence. Even worse is her reason for doing so - her message for unity between the races went so well humans were starting to tear apart the robots for organs.
  • Black Widow eats a dog. This is early on in the chaos, when nobody knows why the heroes are going mad.
  • The opening line of Marvel Zombies 2. 'I can't believe we ate the whole thing'. As in, the zombies ate the entire universe's population. In other words, Spider-Man and the others ate uncountable numbers of people.
  • The Halloween special gives us a zombified Karolina Dean, who is so far gone that not only does she eat meat, but she eats children. For added horror, there are no Earth-2149 counterparts for either Molly Hayes or Klara Prast...
  • The same special reveals one more chilling thing: Mephisto is still operating as usual and he is not a zombie. He does protect human survivors, but only so he could corrupt them in the future. It's quite debatable as of which fate is worse - becoming a zombie chow or surviving due to making a Deal with the Devil and inevitably having to pay for that in the long run.

Resurrection

  • The 2019 prologue has the unsettling setup of a seemingly dead Galactus with an incredibly pained expression on his face. This gets worse when you find out that the reason he's like this is because the Brood are using him to breed and ascend.
  • Carol Danvers sends a message to Earth telling them to come and see Galactus's corpse, and a team of Heroes is sent in. Unfortunately the innards of the corpse is filled to the brim with zombies and every single hero (except Wolverine) sent in is dispatched and infected moments after they begin to realize what's happening.
  • Peter's spider-senses have become worse than useless in this reality, going off every moment from the severity of the situation and giving him nonstop headaches. It's noted that arguably his greatest power may end up killing him eventually.
  • Forge and Valeria are seen using Cyclops's head and the Human Torch's hand respectively as weapons to fight the Galactus Hive infectees. If you're not concerned about the fact that they're willing to use their dead friends and family to fight, you can think about the logistics of using Cyclops's head to shoot lasers.
  • Forge decides to take everyone to the X-Mansion against Peter's wishes. He really should have left well enough alone.
    • The walls are covered in insane ramblings on the walls written by Deadheads, worshippers of the respawned. Incidentally, said Deadheads have a tendency to sacrifice other humans to the respawned.
      COME AND SEE
      BLESSED ARE THE ALL-STRONG
      WITH THE GIFT SHALL IT MAKE THE WORLD CLEAN!
      HUNGER?
    • Peter's group frees a group of sacrifices and runs into the group of Deadheads that were keeping them... to feed to Beast, who promptly devours the lead Deadhead in a rather gory fashion before ripping Forge open.
      Forge: "We can cure this too!"
      Beast: "Cure."
      Beast: "It's you we're curing!"
    • While awesome, there is something unsettling about Peter accidentally beheading Beast with an attack.
  • Marvel Zombies: Resurrection #3 reveals the real cause of the Respawned: The Brood.


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