Legions of zombies have shambled across every major platform in American media since the 1930s, but the undead hordes that rampaged through the 1950s Pre-Code horror comics have remained relatively underappreciated despite their unprecedented influence. In fact, the Pre-Code era’s The Walking Dead may represent the zombie genre’s single most transformative texts. The following chapter traces American horror comics’ appropriation of zombie forms across several memorable publishers, titles, and creators to more accurately illustrate their enduring influence on not only comics history but also twenty-first-century zombie media. From 1948 to 1954, the mid-century horror trend would conjure America’s most controversial comic books. Their chaotic contents included every form of undead monstrosity including reanimated skeletons, shrieking specters, aristocratic vampires, fiendish demons, and ancient mummies, but the zombie quickly became its seminal ghoul. Horror comics from every Pre-Code publisher featured multitudes of reanimated corpses and undead monstrosities. In fact, the era’s zombie comics provided what some scholars call “an overdetermined space” that powerfully expanded the significance of a creature previously associated with Biblical apocalypse, “anxieties and fears around slavery,” and postcolonial legacies of “Franco-Caribbean” trauma and turmoil (Goodrum, Michael and Philip Smith, Printing Terror: American Horror Comics as Cold War Commentary and Critique. Manchester University Press, 2024: 126). Traumatized creators, troubled readers, and turbulent times invested comic book zombies with an fresh and urgent hunger. Previously zombies were cursed, enslaved, or controlled. Now, they could stalk, torture, and devour their terrified human prey. As a result, the zombie ghoul, “predatory and ravenous,” became the “filthiest” of Pre-Code comics’ ferocious monsters: “For all its nastiness, however, the ghoul is also one of the best infiltrators,” able to invade homes, businesses, churches, schools, court rooms, automobiles, airplanes, and even space ships to viciously exact vengeance (Trombetta, Jim, The Horror! The Horror! Comic Books the Government Didn’t Want You to Read!. Abrams, 2010: 244). Either alone or in packs, undead invasions, interruptions, and assaults typify Pre-Code horror.