Superstar artist Mike Allred admired the vintage wallpaper of a bar he was patronizing one night.

Unable to get the wallpaper out of his mind, he hit the drawing board. Mike imagined creepy things coming out of the paper’s repetitive pattern and was inspired to create the cover of iZombie #19. No copy and pasting here, Mike drew every single one of the scrollwork images by hand!

Check out the sketch and final cover below.

I,ZOMBIE #13 begins the storyline "Six Feet Under & Rising." Zombie girl Gwen and her friends solve a mystery just in time to keep an even more mysterious appointment with Amon, the sexy mummy. What could he possibly want to tell Gwen today of all days?

And, this lucky issue number 13 includes the first of a series of backup stories where we meet a group of government agents who will soon be making life very difficult for Gwen and company. Just who are the Dead Presidents?

I grew up reading old monster comics and watching the classic black-and-white Universal monster movies, and loving all of them. But it always bugged me a little that they seemed to exist in a world in which there were so many different WAYS to become a monster. Bitten by a werewolf under a full moon, or bitten by a vampire, or cobbled together from a bunch of dead bodies… there was a completely different set of rules at work for every monster, a completely different rationale. But why SHOULD a vampire’s bite turn you into a vampire, and why do vampires crave blood? And, perhaps even more germane for the heroine of iZombie, why do zombies crave brains (which they have at least for the last thirty years or so)?

iZombie began with a brief paragraph-long pitch, that centered entirely on the main character and her personal issues. I didn’t have to spend a lot of time worrying about how her world worked, or the rules of zombies. But when Vertigo editor extraordinaire Shelly Bond asked me to flesh that one paragraph out into a full proposal, I knew I was going to have to work out how that world worked, and how the various monsters worked within it.

I was heading off to a convention that weekend, and so spent the whole flight out furiously scribbling down notes in longhand in a spiral-bound notebook. And when I got to the convention, I used every second I wasn’t on panels or doing signings transferring those scribbled notes over to my laptop, and gradually fleshing them out. And when I was done, I had worked out who each of the supporting characters and antagonists in the series would be, at least in general terms (it wasn’t until Mike Allred signed onboard a few weeks later that many of them came into focus). And more importantly, I worked HOW monsters worked in this world.

I won’t go into TOO much detail about the metaphysics of iZombie, since it would spoil some of the later chapters in the first collection, iZombie Vol. 1: Dead To The World, but the basics are these: everyone has more than one soul, and they don’t always depart with the death of the body. The basic notion is lifted from the beliefs of the ancient Egyptians, but filtered here through the bicameral structure of 20th century psychology, with one soul associated with the conscious mind, and the other with the unconscious. And once I’d worked THAT out, I suddenly knew why vampires craved blood, why zombies craved brains, and why some ghosts seemed charming and personable and others were seemingly mindless shrieking phantoms.

I always like to work out the rules of a world before I get too deep into writing about it, because I find it helps me to know what is and isn’t possible. And the nice thing about working out my own personal “unified theory of monsters” is that it suddenly occurred to me that we could make use of many MORE monsters than we had originally intended. Someday, lord willing and the creek don’t rise, I hope to get a giant mutated kaiju monster into the book (don’t tell Mike and Shelly, though, I’m keeping it a secret). I don’t know why or when we’ll use it, but now that I know the rules of the world, I know exactly HOW we’ll be able to pull it off!

--Chris Roberson

iZombie began with two simple ideas.

The first had to do with zombies themselves. Unlike their other monster brethren, zombies had become a bit limited in scope in recent decades, it seemed to me. We’ve seen vampire stories set in different historical epochs, werewolf stories set in the modern day, Frankenstein’s monster stories set in the future, and on and on. But unlike other monsters, who could be easily used in any historical or cultural setting, zombies had by and large been relegated to the “post-apocalyptic/societal collapse” scenario, typically in a world reduced to chaos and even savagery by the emergence of the zombies themselves. (There HAVE been zombie stories set in the past, most notably in the Old West and in Victorian England, but these always seemed to me to be the first steps to some alternate history post-apocalypse, rather than a glimpse of “our” own past.) Zombies were seldom seen lurking in the shadows of OUR world, in the modern day. Well, why not?

The second thought had to do with one of the standard tropes of monster fiction: namely, that a normal person when turned into a monster becomes, well, MONSTROUS. A regular Joe or Jane Q. Public when bitten by a vampire or werewolf inevitably becomes dark and brooding, if not all out EVIL. But why? If I was bitten by a werewolf, I wouldn’t suddenly abandon my wife and child to live a dark and maudlin existence at the edges of society. I’d just lock the door once a month, and otherwise get on with business.

So what if we had a zombie in the modern world, I thought, who DIDN’T immediately go all dark and depressing. What if it were a zombie who retained enough of their memories and personality to know they didn’t want to hurt anyone, but just wanted to get along. What would they be like? What would they do for fun? And more importantly, how would they get the BRAINS they needed? (As for why zombies need brains, that’s a whole OTHER story…)

Gwen Dylan was the result of that line of thinking, and iZombie is her story.

-Chris Roberson