Day Of The Dead

How the Harvey Award-nominated comic Revival became a Syfy series

- WORDS: TARA BENNETT

WHAT IF YOU DIED, THEN CAME back to life like nothing happened? In 2012, writer Tim Seeley and artist Mike Norton explored that sobering scenario in their award-winning Image Comics series Revival. But it wasn’t treated with the gravitas of a zombie story or bleak supernatural drama. Instead, Seeley and Norton grounded the incredible occurrences of “Revival Day” by keeping it inside the borders of the pragmatic Midwest town of Wausau, Wisconsin, with its quirky, salt-of-the-earth types.

Filmmaker Luke Boyce already knew Seeley; together with producer Aaron B Koontz, the trio collaborated on the film Revealer in 2022 which led to them developing Revival first as a film, then as a television series.

Boyce tells Red Alert that they figured out that an episodic format was best suited to capture the variety of tones - comedy, horror and thriller - that sets the comic apart. “One of the great things about the comic is it creates this big canvas for tone. It’s something Tim does well, and that’s one of the fun things about adapting Seeley. He does quirky within a very emotionally complex situation. Obviously he’s a huge horror fan, and we're huge horror fans, so that mixes really well too.”