A terrifying swarm of new Night of the Living Dead comics is creeping your way

The epidemic of zombie-themed entertainment we're currently immersed in owes its rotting soul to George Romero's classic 1968 black-and-white horror flick Night of the Living Dead. For those of us who can't quite get enough of the shambling brain-munchers, a new comic-book company called Double Take is exploring Romero's dead-dotted landscape with Ultimate Night of the Living Dead, a three-pronged attack of zombie-centric comics set in the same world.  Titled Rise, Z-Men and Home, these first three comics, written by Bill Jemas, Jeff McComsey, Michael Coast and Peter Aquero, expand the universe of the risen undead that Romero introduced the world to nearly 50 years ago.

Here are the official summaries of each new series:

RISE

Follow our favorite siblings, Barbara and Johnny, from the classic 1968 Night of the Living Dead film as they try to survive beyond the night at the abandoned farmhouse.

Z-MEN

Dead and/or alive, LBJ orders the Secret Service to bring him back a Zombie.  It's 1966 and the Oval Office is in an uproar; there's been a spree of mass murders in Western Pennsylvania and reports of the dead returning to life.  President Lyndon B. Johnson assigns the head of the Secret Service to send agents into the field to investigate.  Agents Stuart and Clancy are given the opportunity to serve their country and see if the zombie apocalypse has indeed begun.

HOME

A happy family, a lovely spring evening, and Zombies. Home follows a working-class farm family through the events of the zombie apocalypse in western PA. On the night the dead rise, the Foster family has gathered for a quiet Sunday dinner. Oblivious to the horrifying events that will soon unfold, Paul Foster takes his wife and two young children into town, leaving his teenage daughter home alone with her boyfriend. As his small town falls into chaos, Paul has to keep his family together and somehow get home to his daughter, who's left to fight her own battles.

Though these three titles take place in the same Western Pennsylvania territory where Romero's victims initially huddled in a boarded-up farmhouse, it seems free to discover all the different facets of a full-scale zombie pandemic much in the same vein of The Walking Dead's L.A.-based spinoff.  Since adaptation rights to Night of the Living Dead are now in the public domain, Double Take plans to exploit the available material with a swarm of horror writers poised to breath new life into the franchise, using exisiting characters from the film and discovering clusters of fresh stories within the realm and inserted into as many as 12 new series.  Two other series, Slab and Spring, will be rolled out later this year.  

Is the world ready for a dozen more zombie comics, or are you feeling the effects of deadhead fatigue?

~blastr.com