Cemetery Kids Run Rabid, the sequel to 2024’s Cemetery Kids Don’t Die, sees writer Zac Thompson and artist Daniel Irizarri level up their series, pushing into more interesting and exciting places whilst consistently committing to being a fun and exciting horror comic. It’s great to see an indie series really get a chance to grow and evolve, and the creative team use that opportunity to explore their themes and ideas in far greater depth without sacrificing entertainment. We sat down with series writer Zac Thompson to discuss Cemetery Kids Run Rabid, the genesis behind it, and creating fun art with meaning.
This interview has been edited for clarity.
JARED BIRD: Cemetery Kids Run Rabid #1 launched from Oni Press on 13th August, 2025 and is scheduled to run for four issues. To those unfamiliar, how would you explain Cemetery Kids?
ZAC THOMPSON: Well the short pitch I always tell people is that it’s A Nightmare on Elm Street meets Sword Art Online. The longer pitch is that it’s about four friends who use a flesh-based video game hyper-console to play games in their dreams. In the first arc, Cemetery Kids Don’t Die, one of their friends gets trapped in the game, and Run Rabid is about what happens when they bring that trapped friend back home.
BIRD: What led to the creation of a sequel to Cemetery Kids Don’t Die?
THOMPSON: There was a lot of talk during the original series about what we could do with the world and how far we could take the core concept. It lends itself to any group of kids engaging with this game, really, but at the end of the day the ending of the first arc was very much a question mark rather than a full stop. That was done on purpose to coax readers into wanting us to do more of this. In my mind I see Run Rabid as a possession story – what is left in you from this potentially sentient technology that invaded your consciousness and rewrote a year of your life, walking around inside of your flesh. That idea was too tasty to give up.
The first arc is essentially about confronting trauma, and about the bond between two siblings who have experienced the same trauma but processed it very differently. Trauma tends to compound. Every character in the first arc had this horrible thing happen to them, so why don’t we look at the compounding effects of these horrible things, and delve deeper into living with that trauma?
BIRD: Something I really liked about the start of Cemetery Kids Run Rabid is that, hypothetically, you could read it without having read the first arc, but regardless of whether you have read it or not you can tell that these characters have been through something. When you start a new story arc, I think there’s a temptation to put the toys back in the box and go back to the status quo, so I liked that this was an organic build based on the last arc and the serious consequences of what happened.
THOMPSON: That was an internal debate we had too. We did discuss whether we wanted to put a lot of it back in the box, so to speak, and talk about things in a hand-holding way. I spoke to my editor, Sierra Hahn, about how I don’t like when characters have conversations with each other that are ‘as you know’ type of conversations. I felt like the best way to split the difference was to open the second arc with a worldbuilding page that gives the details on how the technology works, and what this world is like, before we get right into it. It just feels inauthentic otherwise, and I never want to waste anyone’s time. I’m glad you said it works regardless of whether you’ve read the first arc, because that was the intent as well.
BIRD: What was it like to work with Daniel Irizarri once again?
THOMPSON: I love Daniel Irizarri. We have such a close collaboration at this point. I just talked to him on the phone for like an hour yesterday about a single page in the last issue that felt really important. We were able to just talk it out and build it organically. As I work with someone longer I tend to pare my scripting down. I’m very descriptive at the beginning, but as we develop a relationship there’s less and less because I know what Daniel’s going to do and what he’s capable of. I can turn around to him and say ‘Hey, remember this page from the third issue of the first arc? Let’s do something like that’, and he’ll immediately know.
He’s so versatile in what he brings to the page and his storytelling is so sharp. He’ll add panels or take away panels and the storytelling becomes so much clearer because of the way he thinks about storytelling on the page. He does such a remarkable job at making the reality of the world compared to the game feel distinct, even in a way where you don’t even think about it. The paneling on the real-world stuff from Daniel is always very clear and rigid, and then the video game is always jagged and a bit more chaotic and wild. At first glance you don’t really absorb that information, but as you read you get a sense of the rhythm of both worlds, and I just love that so much.
BIRD: That’s the kind of subconscious detail that makes such a difference when differentiating the two worlds. The fact that both of them read so well despite how differently they are constructed is a testament to Irizarri’s understanding of the page and how to structure a scene or moment.
THOMPSON: I feel like he’s a bit of a well-kept secret. He’s been around for years doing all sorts of books, including Judge Dredd and shorts for EC Comics. He was someone that came up at Oni very early on, and I wanted to just let him run with the series and work alongside him. Just from some of the pin-ups he was posting, I knew he’d nail the character designs. I wanted the characters to look very cool and Daniel’s always excelled at that.
BIRD: What was it like to work with Oni Press on the book?
THOMPSON: Oni Press is awesome. The week after Cemetery Kids Don’t Die came out, they got in touch and said ‘Let’s do four more of these’. I’ve never really had that sort of endorsement from a publisher before, where they really liked it and wanted to support it. It wasn’t the best-selling book I’ve ever done or anything, they just believed in the core concept of it. They told me that something really important to them is for people to go into a store and be able to see multiple volumes of something on a shelf, and I said to them ‘say no more!’. I’m very happy with them.
Hunter Gorinson and Sierra Hahn, the two masterminds behind the publisher, are doing very innovative things and they’re thinking outside the box. I really do believe their comics occupy a special space in a very crowded market, they stand out over and over again. I told them ‘I’m so down to run with you guys. If you want to keep making stuff, sign me up.’ I love people who are open to experimentation and challenging themselves. Even the idea of changing the title, that would’ve been a really long debate at any other publisher, but Oni just agreed immediately because it was different and fun. When you’re a creative with a vision, and people want to support that vision, it’s amazing. I will work with them until they’re tired of me.
BIRD: I think Oni has done a great job at providing a home for books that would escape categorisation elsewhere. Other publishers might look at something like Cemetery Kids, with young protagonists but heavy themes, and force you to change it to either be less horrific or have the characters be older. It’s a core part of the story, these kids are dealing with something terrifying and impossible to reckon with. I like that Oni was willing to hear that out as it was.
THOMPSON: Oni are willing to take chances, and stand-out, like you said. Cemetery Kids was one of the first titles in their recent relaunch, and they wanted something that defied classification and evoked how genre-defying comics can be, where there are science fiction / horror hybrids. If you took that to a movie studio, they might write it off as a disaster. They wouldn’t know how to market it, and have issues with kids being put in these situations, but Oni Press embraced the chaos.
After a while I took a step back, I realised that the book is set in Toronto, in a video game-adjacent reality, with a young cast – It’s almost like Scott Pilgrim, in a way, which I didn’t realise until after it came out. That made me think ‘Yeah! This fits at Oni!’.
BIRD: Something I loved about the series is the bio-mechanical cyberpunk element, where devices like the Dreamwave have an unsettling and organic quality to them. What informed that approach?
THOMPSON: Genuinely just my approach to things is to tell collaborators that our worlds are ‘left’ of reality. I told Daniel that the dreamwave would be a flesh console, using your brain as an operating system, but at the same time every computer, phone, tablet should have that quality as well. It’s the world they live in. We’re never going to explain this or get into a protracted diatribe of where it comes from or how it emerged. It’s interesting when characters take that at face value, because it’s just the world that they live in, but the reader is left with an uncanny sense that something is wrong. You look at that and think ‘I wouldn’t put that on my head’. They live in a world where they would, they just don’t know any better. There’s a layer of voyeurism to it, where you’re glimpsing into an alternate reality. ‘I don’t want you to put that on your head, but I want to see what happens when you do’.
BIRD: I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention David Cronenberg as well.
THOMPSON: Hell yeah!
BIRD: It reminded me of the game console from eXistenZ, which is plugged into a hole in the back of your spine. I wish more works of fiction explored stuff like that. We accept these devices as fine and acceptable because they look a certain way, but what if they didn’t?
THOMPSON: David Cronenberg does this really well. The invasiveness isn’t subtext. Your phone is an invasive object in the way that it interacts with your day to day life, but it’s designed to be as unobtrusive as possible. An extension of yourself. If you take that invasiveness as text, and make it part of the technology, a lot of people would look at it differently. eXistenZ was a huge reference point. It came out in the late 90’s, before video games had progressed in a certain way. I was thinking about it and how we talk about it in a modern way. World of Warcraft exists. It’s an entire second reality that people have relationships in and have spent years of their lives building houses and stuff. You can go and occupy that space and be there, and no one in your life knows about it unless you tell them. I have a nephew, who’s around eleven, and Fortnite is his whole life. He’s been playing it since he was six. That’s almost his whole life. I remember a world with a clear delineation between these things, and it’s not so clear anymore. You have friends you play Fortnite with and maybe never meet them in real life.
BIRD: People probably predicted it about the internet but few people foresaw how far it would go. I remember reading about a woman who passed away, and her daughter had to log in to Final Fantasy XIV to let these various friendships, who she exclusively spoke to through the MMO-RPG, know that she had died. That specific form of delivery was quite strange and striking.
THOMPSON: It’s beautiful and dystopian in equal measure. I love that kind of stuff, where there’s something gross about it but there’s also a sense of camaraderie to it. My brother and I struggled to have a friendship when we were younger. We were three years apart and never agreed on anything. When World of Warcraft came out, we both had our own computers, so we decided to roll characters together. All of a sudden, we had something in common. We’re such good friends now these days, but that was a huge part of the foundation of our friendship. It was so valuable to my life.
BIRD: How did you go about balancing the adventurous and fantastical elements of the narrative with the horrific and the upsetting?
THOMPSON: It’s always a delicate dance. The tension between two worlds between high fantasy and more grounded reality. Early in my career Lonnie Nadler and I wrote a series called Undone By Blood, which contrasted the fantasy of early pulp novels with the reality of the West. I started to think about managing the tension of two different genres in that space. A lot of it came down to notes I gave to Daniel. When they’re in the game, they should be talking about real life. When they’re in real life, they should be talking about the game. The horror of the game is combated with the minutiae of our lives, but then the real world has to deal with ‘The wildest thing just happened’ and ‘my brother might be possessed’. As the series go forward, especially with Run Rabid, the two worlds bleed together, and the comforts afforded to them are slowly stripped away. Things get pretty wild, no holds barred. The third issue mashes the worlds together and removes all the comfort, and I think it’s going to be fun for people to experience.
BIRD: That sounds wicked. A great aspect of the series’ cast is their diverse perspective and range of backgrounds. A lot of people don’t even put in the bare minimum. How did you go about researching for characters like Birdie, whose experience in life may be incredibly different from your own?
THOMPSON: I grew up with a disabled parent. Disability representation is something that is very important to me. My father was disabled when I was seven years old, and had trouble walking, needing to learn how to talk again as well. It was debilitating. I spent a lot of my young life interacting with caretakers and participating in it, but never seeing it in the media I consumed. I thought this would be an interesting opportunity to both explore that and talk about escapism. Birdie can go to a world where things are different for her. I wanted to address immediately in the first arc that Birdie is okay with her condition. There’s a scene in Don’t Die where she’s accused of being obsessed with the game so she can walk again, but Birdie immediately explains that it’s not her reasoning at all, and she’s okay with herself and her life. Often if you meet someone who has been through that, they don’t yearn for something different, they accept that it’s their life and they are who they are. It’s the world that needs to be different, because the world is so fucking hostile to people dealing with disability.
It’s something important to me and I wanted to talk about it. The first arc is about trauma, and the car accident that separates Pic and Birdie. The second arc doesn’t really address it, it’s just part of her. In Run Rabid I wanted to focus on Wilson, who becomes disabled as a result of the events of Don’t Die, and dealing with a cognitive disability. How does that change you? Being unable to do something you used to love to do. If all of your friends are swimmers, and you can’t get in the pool, it sucks. Body horror is a good vehicle to explore these themes, but I wanted to make sure it was grounded in a very real place. I read X-Men comics and wish they focused on the weirdos and the people who don’t fit in, in a world that hates and fears them. I’m the Morlock guy. THere’s a lot of that, focusing on what I don’t see. It was a huge part of my first conversation with Oni, and I told them all of the characters would deal with some sort of disability at some point in time, mental or physical. That’s not going to be the huge focus of their arc. There’s so many stories about curing disability, but that’s not a reality for 99% of people. Most people will have firsthand experience with disability at some point in their lives.
I wanted to create something for me when I was fourteen, which reflects what I was feeling. When I was writing the first arc, my father had a damaging fall and had to use wheelchair. That was happening simultaneously as I wrote the series, and I was doing research on how people experience life in a wheelchair whilst also helping my father with his experiences using a wheelchair. It was a strange moment of life informing art, where I was really able to imbue the reality of that experience on the page. Me and Daniel spoke a lot about making sure it worked well, accommodating that aspect of her character at every turn.
BIRD: Thank you so much for sharing that, first of all. A very dear friend of mine is a wheelchair user, and I didn’t know much about it until I met them. It didn’t come from a place of purposeful negligence, but more so a lack of knowledge. They detailed so much of their experience to me, about life in the United Kingdom with it. For example, how almost every train station in the country has stairs, and many of them are inaccessible without using stairs, so they have to consider that with their route, accommodating what stations they’d need to avoid. I’d never really thought about that before. They told me once that ‘this could happen to anyone at any time, and no one talks about it’. That really moved me, because it is so true. You don’t see it discussed or forefronted in so much of popular culture. Debatably the most famous examples in comics are Professor X, who has been miraculously ‘cured’ countless times, and Barbara Gordon, who has not used a wheelchair for fourteen years now.
THOMPSON: Oracle was huge for me as a kid. I didn’t experience disability myself but I was so close to it, and you search for anything that talks about it and the feelings associated with it. The examples are minimal. I wanted to create a character who exists outside of typical representations of teenage girls, and was closer to potential reality. I always think about ‘if I was 12, and walked into the comic shop, and I saw this, it would hit me in the heart’. It would’ve been a good thing to see.
BIRD: Following up from that, out of the characters, who was your favorite to write?
THOMPSON: I love Birdie, I love writing her. She’s so tenacious. Even at the beginning of this arc as she’s convincing herself everything’s fine, she’s just like ‘Fuck, I can’t lie to myself’. I really like writing characters going through that moment of ‘this is fine, I can get through this’ before realising ‘no, I can’t.’ This time around though, Wilson was my favorite. I spent so much of my teenage years aimless and wondering how I fit into social groups and I wanted to tackle that feeling of being the outsider looking in, and what that looks like. A lot of stories are about tight knit characters, so what happens when one of those characters falls out of step with the rest of the group?
I found that when I was younger, I had tons of people I was friends with until I was twelve or thirteen, and then I started to change and I didn’t fit in with those people anymore. I started to wonder if I needed new friends, and I think every teenager goes through that, but it’s a difficult experience. I was hanging out with hockey players, but I’m kind of a nerd, right? I don’t want to talk about hockey. Where are the guys who play board games? You can’t always find them easily. Especially in a world before phones, you would have to look through social cues to try and find your group. I wanted to write about that experience, finding your identity when you find yourself on the outs with the people who were your group.
BIRD: It’s something I found very relatable in the first couple issues. Something happens and you’re out of step. No one can fault you for that, but you can’t fault the others either for not experiencing the same. There’s a tension there about whether you force things back together, or find other friends. That was a fascinating element to Wilson’s character, for me.
THOMPSON: The effects of a multidimensional demon lord are out of your control.
BIRD: Happens to the best of us, I suppose. Between this and other titles like Into the Unbeing, you’ve carved out quite an impressive horror comics resume. What advice would you give to creators who want to make horror in the medium of comics?
THOMPSON: Write about what scares you personally. There is the adage that the more personal you make something, the more universal it tends to be for people. If there’s something you’re embarrassed to share or you think is cringey, you’re probably on the right track, and consider the horror around that thing. It’s ‘cringey’ to put something out in the world where you admit you’re really scared of climate change, or of forest fires, because people truly do not want to think about what makes them uncomfortable. At the same time, if you can create that line of communication and connection with people, you can create a shared feeling of dread and horror. Scott Snyder talks about this all the time – write about what scares you, and you’ll inevitably start to scare other people.
BIRD: I love Scott Snyder’s writing advice.
THOMPSON: I listened to a talk of his in around 2011, and I don’t think I’ve gotten the chance to tell him in person, but it was so important to me because it was talking about horror and how to make it relatable. I was in film school at the time for screenwriting, trying to figure out how to make a thing that resonated with me. I really held on to that. The script I was working on at the time became my first comic, and inevitably the thing that launched my writing career.
I’m from a very small community, which didn’t have a lot of homeless folks when I was young. I was going to school in downtown Vancouver, which is famous for having a noticeable homeless community. At first I was terrified, because I had never experienced anything like it. Those people take care of each other though, and have a community. From scratching at that, that’s where The Dregs came from, my first comic with Lonnie Nadler and Eric Zawadski. I have a whole career in comics because I couldn’t let go of something that made me uncomfortable, and I wanted to put that out to the world.
BIRD: What do you hope readers take away from Cemetery Kids Run Rabid?
THOMPSON: I want you to take away whatever you feel like you want to take away. It is a story about how secondary realities can both bring us together and isolate us, and that’s all I want people to think about. How do you use technology and how does technology use you? How does that interplay happen? At the end of the day, it’s not a one-sided conversation. It’s a transaction. People are letting go of their critical thinking skills to use ChatGPT and similar things, and it’s using you. You’re giving away your agency. If you’re in university, and you’re using ChatGPT to write all your papers, why are you there? You’re not doing anything. That’ll get you your degree, but you won’t be able to do a job. People don’t think about it as transactional. They are trained to think we’re getting something out of it and it’s not getting anything from us, but you’re feeding a training module.
BIRD: I’ve seen it first hand, having just finished a degree that started just before ChatGPT took off. Watching in real time as it progressed. It was distressing. Your brain is a muscle, it works because you train it. It becomes better at things with effort and practice. The more you read and write and analyse, the better you’ll be, but you’re cutting that process off at the stem for a quick, effortless answer.
THOMPSON: It’s leaving territory in your mind for nothing. I find it really distressing. I’ve seen people try to generate supposedly legally binding contracts with ChatGPT, to which the response has appropriately been ‘None of this is right and no, I can’t sign a document made with ChatGPT’. There’s arguments that it takes less time and it’s easier, but it’s taking something away from you. I can’t help but ask questions about why this technology is on the rise now, as we deal with a global rise in fascism. Something designed to erode critical thinking is designed to make you not question anything. It’s not good.
BIRD: One last question. What other works of yours would you recommend to readers who enjoyed Cemetery Kids Run Rabid?
THOMPSON: I’d say read Into The Unbeing. It’s a very different type of book. It’s bigger and more adventurous. If you like the level design element of Cemetery Kids, Into The Unbeing is that amplified with environments changing constantly. It’s illustrated and designed by Hayden Sherman, who just won an Eisner for Absolute Wonder Woman, and you really can’t find any better art out there right now.
