In Netflix's Santa Clarita Diet, Drew Barrymore plays Sheila, a suburban realtor and mom who mysteriously becomes a zombie. A comic even exists in this world, appropriately titled Mombie (a mom who is a zombie, get it?). But is the Mombie from Santa Clarita Diet a real comic? Unfortunately, it doesn't look like an actual mom zombie comic book like Mombie exists, but there are other illustrated works that embrace that title and could make good companions to Santa Clarita Diet, if you find yourself craving more undead mom stories.
In Episode 2 of Santa Clarita Diet, Sheila's daughter Abby cuts school with her neighbor Eric and they head to a comic book store, where Abby finds the Mombie comic. She skims it with great curiosity, even though Eric assures her that Sheila is a different kind of zombie and the owner only limits them to looking at comics for 30 seconds. It's a fun self-referential and self-aware moment for the series. So while that exact Mombie comic doesn't exist, Abby may get a kick out of the other "mombie" comics and art currently out there.
There is an illustrated children's book called The Mombie by hip-hop star AWOL ONE (whose real name is Tony Martin) which was funded on Kickstarter on 2012 and published in 2013, along with a companion soundtrack. "This storybook is about The Mombie, and her friendly but weird family, and how they all deal with a new born baby," AWOL ONE wrote on the Kickstarter campaign website. "The book is written like a rap, like a modern day Dr. Seuss."
In 2015, Derek Achoy's web comic Smiling Ribs published a two-part comic strip called "Mombie," in which a mother who ate poison comes back to life as a — you guessed it — zombie.
And that's not the only web comic to take on zombie moms. Matt Czap's Eat That Toast represented the topic in a strip from 2013, which is about a young woman who loves reading about zombies — and then her mother becomes undead in an actual zombie apocalypse.
Cartoonist Scott Breier also illustrated the concept of mom-as-a-zombie in cute comic panel called "Mombie," in which a zombie mom orders her zombie child to finish his human flesh dinner.
The TV series Catastrophe also deals with the topic of "mombies" in the second episode of Season 2. But in this case, no one changes into a literal zombie. Instead, Sharon tries to bond with the more figurative mom zombies at a Mummy and Me group.
The term "Mombie" seems to have gained popularity in recent years, boasting lots of Etsy items available under that category and being used in media outlets such as the Today show.
So even though Abby's Mombie comic sadly doesn't exist in real life, there are plenty of other "mombie" representations into which you can sink your teeth.
