So Marvel Animation have a new miniseries based on an episode of a previous miniseries What If…?. The new series Marvel Zombies continues the story of the episode “What If…Zombies?”. It follows a group of survivors as they risk their lives fighting superpowered zombies to save the world. It comes from Bryan Andrews and Zeb Wells, who are the showrunner/director and head writer respectively. Naturally, this is a separate universe from our own Marvel Universe, so you’ll see similar characters, but they won’t be the exact versions we know and love. This series does that and then some with plenty of characters, and eventually turns some of them into zombies. If you need a refresher on that What If…? episode, the series does a decent job of keeping people up to speed, but it doesn’t come until the second episode of the series.

The series features the same animation style as What If…? as well, so if you enjoy that, you’ll get a kick out of this series. But the real question remains, is Marvel Zombies good, bad, or is it ugly? Let’s find out.

The Good Of Marvel Zombies

Marvel Zombies features plenty of characters that we haven’t seen on screen a lot like Blade, Shang-Chi, Kamala Khan, and others. That’s really the coolest part of the series is that we get to learn more about these characters, even if they’re different versions of our own. In particular, the series focuses on Kamala Khan and her powers, she’s the anchor of the series. It’s up to her to fix the issue of the zombies and fight back against the villain, the Scarlet Witch.

Blade/Blade Knight is easily the highlight character of the series. We are still waiting for a Blade movie, but this gives us a mashup of two fan favorite characters in Moon Knight and Blade. We even get a Khonshu sighting at one point in the series. The action scenes with Blade are breathtaking, and you get one in all four episodes of the series.

Seeing all of these different characters interact is always the best part of Marvel mash-ups. Since I saw Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, I wanted to see him interact with all the other characters of Marvel like Spider-Man, Captain America, or others. You get to see that and then some here, as he leads his own team of survivors in the zombie universe.

The other breathtaking (in a frightening way) aspect of Marvel Zombies is the villains. Seeing your favorite characters turn into zombies that are bloodthirsty AND immensely powerful is terrifying. There won’t be any spoilers here, but seeing some of the highest power Marvel characters as zombies is a huge selling point for this series.

The Bad Of Marvel Zombies

As the episodes go on, the story for Marvel Zombies goes from something that feels smaller scale (even though the world has been taken over by zombies) to a more clichéd and traditional Marvel story with gigantic multiversal stakes. I get that we’re in the multiverse saga right now, but it was on its way to being a refreshingly small-scale story of getting a possible cure to the zombie curse to a hodgepodge of multiverse stuff.

Like some of the iffier episodes of What If…? this series feels like its following a bit of a similar trajectory to our own Marvel movies, and changes it very slightly. They even make a joke about this in the second episode. There’s also a bit going on here where some seriously major characters get sidelined and depowered. With the villains being massively overpowered here, we’re left with a lot of the human/upgraded human characters and the most powerful get left behind.

It’s a storyline compromise, of course, but it would have been nice to see just what some of the more powerful characters in Marvel could do against an army of the undead.

The Ugly Of Marvel Zombies

A lot of the voice actors return to reprise their roles from the physical MCU and some of the people that they bring in to do imitations or voice other characters who don’t have their actors reprising their roles are good to great, particularly Todd Williams as Blade Knight. But some of the other replacement voice actors do not sound a thing like their MCU counterparts. They don’t sound like them to such a degree that it is distracting while watching the series. If you’re going to copy the face of the person in the MCU like they do in this series, finding someone to copy the voice would have done well.

There’s also an issue with the series, because of the four-episode format, there are characters that get lost and then there are characters that are made out to be important to the overall narrative, that get tossed aside in the final episode. Like the 6-episode format of Marvel’s live-action series, this one makes it feel like a movie was cut up into four episodes and we don’t get enough time with certain characters to care about them. Rintrah, the minotaur at Kamar-Taj is a great example of this, who leads the group on their plan to save the world from the Scarlet Witch, but we don’t get any backstory at all on who they are or why they’re important.

Marvel Zombies Gives Us Plenty Of Action And Still Ends Up Worthy Of A Watch For Marvel Animation Fans

The series is TV-MA, which means we get to see a level of violence we don’t normally do on our Disney+ screens. Through it all, there are plenty of cheer-worthy moments in Marvel Zombies that will pump up any sort of comic fan. The show does not mess around, particularly instilling the idea that none of these characters are safe and anyone can die a gruesome death at any point. That separates it from the normal MCU projects that we get, where people have to survive to keep the series going on. Here, because of the side-story nature, we get free rein to grieve any of these characters as they bite the dust in horrible ways.

Marvel Zombies premieres all four episodes on Disney+ on September 24th.

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