Comic Book / Zombillénium

Hiring... for all eternity.

Zombillénium is a French-Belgian graphic novel by Arthur de Pins published in Spirou Magazine from 2009 to 2022.

In Zombillénium, a monster-themed amusement park, undead monsters roam... as employees. Not only are the zombies, vampires, werewolves, and other demons real monsters whose souls belong to the devil forever, but they are also tired of their jobs, tired of entertaining consumerist, voyeuristic, and egotistical human beings. Worst of all, it is destined to last for eternity.

One day, Aurélien Zahner, on his way to kill his wife's lover, is run over by a car and killed. Vampire park CEO Francis Von Bloodt, skeleton Union Rep Sirius Jefferson, and suspiciously alive intern Gretchen Webb decide to hire him, though none of them have any idea what sort of monster he's going to be when he wakes up.

The series received an animated prequel in 2017.

This work provides examples of:

• Abhorrent Admirer: Astaroth has a crush on Gretchen during the first half of the series, but she thinks he's just an annoying brat.
• Ambiguously Human:
  • Every single monster in the series is a dead human - the demons, the zombies, the vampires, the werewolves, the blob things, the lagoon creatures... How humanly they should be treated is a running theme.
  • Gretchen and witches in general. They are living people, so not undead, but at least some of them are half-demons with magic powers.
  • Gretchen fails to fully transform Léonie into a rabbit due to frostbite, only giving her bunny ears. She promises her to turn them back to normal if she helps her cause. She eventually keeps them.
• Amusement Park: The series revolves around a monster themed park called Zombillénium and its employees.
• Amusing Injuries: Astaroth somehow always gets his nose broken.
• Asshole Victim: It's hard to feel bad for Hélène Matauzier getting beaten to death by a mob and then hired at Zombillénium after she tried to strangle the (literal) demon out of her son, even if he had to die for it too.
• Badass Beard: Also potentially a Beard of Sorrow: Von Bloodt grows a particularly silky one in the five years that follow his demotion.
• Bad Boss: Jaggar cares only about numbers, satisfying the shareholders, and an extra little bit of cruelty as a personality quirk. When he tries to send Sirius to Hell by firing him for insurbordination and finds out he can't, he picks a random employee contract, destroys it, and claims he will continue to do so every day that his goal numbers aren't met.
• Barred from the Afterlife: Employees of Zombillénium are hired for all eternity. If they are fired from the park itself, they are sent straight to Hell where they power the machines, instead of being allowed to move on.
• Be Careful What You Wish For: As Union Rep, Sirius has spent years riling people up about how the park should be run. He is named CEO after she Sabbat Grand Derby... Which means now he's the one who has to deal with the heckling unions.
• Benevolent Boss: Francis von Bloodt cares for all his employees, hates firing any of them, and drives La Résistance to protect them even after being demoted.
• Big Damn Heroes: Astaroth saves Gretchen from falling into Hell down the Hellevator shaft. She hates that she owes him her life.
• The Big Guy:
  • Blaise is the tallest employee of "natural" height.
  • The park security are minotaurs who are over twice Von Bloodt's height and 700 kilos each.
  • Aurélien's demon form can grow as large as a building.
• Big Red Devil: What the demons in this world are. As Aurélien shows several times, they can get really big.
• Bittersweet Ending: For Gretchen and Aurélien. He sacrifices himself to let her free the trapped souls, and therefore moves on to the afterlife for good with them. She lives on and becomes president of Zombillénium, but prefers to return to head hunting as a sort of vigilante.
• Camp Gay: Sirius tells the human impersonating him to act like that to avoid getting caught. It was actually aimed to offend Ricardo, the actually gay lagoon creature with big anger management issues, for him to unmask the guy.
• Changed My Mind, Kid: Aurélien joins the corporate demons by choice after being released from Charlotte's mind control, out of greed. However, he still loves Gretchen and his friends at the park - when it all comes down to sending one last soul to Hell in order for Gretchen to win the park and release all of them into a proper afterlife, he sacrifices himself and ascends with them, Killed Off for Real.
• Church Militant: Averted with Father Richard, who knows the truth about Zombillénium and is a good friend of Von Bloodt's (his vampire hunter schtick is nothing but a well-honed private joke), but as go-between with the local parishioners, he warns that for a large number of them, this trope is Played Straight - a fact exacerbated by the fact that a lot of Church-goers in the region are very right-wing reactionary, and they hate the park for political reasons as well as religious ones (sapping local trade, very touristic, a result of globalization with the benefits going to fantasy Wall Street, and they don't even hire anyone who lives in the area).
• Comically Missing the Point: When Andrea is killed and hired by Jaggar, Blaise tries to explain to her that she is dead, Barred from the Afterlife, that her soul belongs to the demon Behemoth and that she has to work a 9-to-5 with unpaid overtime for all eternity. Her reaction:
  Andrea: So I'm a vampire now? [Beat] Cool!
• Complete Immortality: As union representative, Sirius is one of the few park employees who cannot be fired - his contract is literally indestructible.
• Decoy Backstory: It turns our fairly quickly that at least part of the backstory Gretchen tells Aurélien in Book 1 is a lie (her father is not Robert Smith but Behemoth). Subsequent books reveal more about her past, and her end goals.
• Does This Remind You of Anything?: Hélène tried to exorcize her child in utero as an attempted abortion, but only managed to give birth to both a human and a demon. She considers Astaroth to be an evil entity possessing her otherwise normal child, is more than willing to abuse and even try to kill him to free Tim from his influence, even though Tim and Astaroth have always been one and the same, and are simply not divisible. Autism moms, anyone?
• Driven to Suicide: Andrea, one of the park visitors, immediately jumps off the Ferris Wheel when her boyfriend breaks up with her on it. Gretchen saves her from the fall, but Jaggar takes it as a free pass to kill and hire her.
• Earn Your Happy Ending: After the Grand Derby, Astaroth frees all the souls that were trapped in Hell. The park is rebuilt and improved, with Sirius as the new CEO and Gretchen as president. It no longer has shareholders but belongs to a cooperative of employees. Level -9 is foreclosed. Hector leaves soul trading to return to work at the park as an executive, Lucie becomes the park's new mascot, Astaroth becomes head of HR after Blaise retires to start a family with Léonie. The people who were transformed during the SGD have a chance to work and live on normally as the Zombillénium franchise expands to England. The employees receive better working and living conditions, and are able to live in harmony with the humans locals. Most importantly, they are no longer hired for all eternity and can move on to the afterlife whenever they please.
• Enemy Mine: The human locals who help La Résistance after Jaggar takes over are doing it for the promise that the park will be closed after they've released the souls.
• Everyone Has Standards: Francis is a Benevolent Boss who hates firing people as he knows what it entails, but he does fire the zombies responsible for Aurélien's first major hulking out, as it endangered visitors.
• Everything Is Racist: The snakes on a gorgon's head at one point discuss whether being a skinhead means someone is a fascist.
  Sake 1: We can all testify!
  Sake 2: Two guys with shaved heads!
  Sake 3: Yeah! Fascists!
  Sake 4: What's with the clichés? Shaved head doesn't necessarily mean fascist.
  Sake 5: From our point of view, it kinda does, Ben!
• Fur Against Fang: Downplayed, as vampire park CEO Francis and werewolf head of HR Blaise are good friends, but they each repeatedly bite Aurélien to turn him into one of their own, each considering there's enough of the other in the park.
• Fat Bastard: Hélène Matauzier is heavily obese and an extremely unpleasant person.
• A Father to His Men: Von Bloodt cares for all his employees, too much for this ruthless corporate world. Even after he gets demoted, he does his damndest to help them escape the abusive work conditions Jaggar keeps them in. As the founder and CEO of the park, he was never an employee, so he could actually leave Zombillénium whenever he wanted. He chose to stay for "his" monsters.
• Flying Broomstick: Gretchen uses a standard broom, except she stands on it when flying, using an attached skateboard deck to facilitate a Sky Surfing-style. In the SGD, Jane has attached motorbike handles and a saddle to hers, and Nina uses scrubbing brushes as rollerblades.
• Formerly Fit:
  • A flashback shows Hélène was significantly thinner before her unwanted pregnancy fifteen years ago.
  • Léonie mentions that she put on thirty kilos after a particularly tough breakup with Tim, who dumped her by ghosting her.
• Glowing Eyes of Doom: All demons have them in their demon form. Vampires as well.
• Graceful Loser: The demons at the end of the SGD - especially Behemoth, who smiles at Gretchen in pride, congratulates her, and walks away.
• Gratuitous German: Von Bloodt occasionally swears in German.
• Gratuitous English:
  • Gretchen, who is British, often exclaims and swears in English. Same for Sirius, who is American.
  • The signs at the park are all in French and in English, as it has an international reach. The signs at the soul trade exchange offices are all in English, as they parodize Wall Street.
• The Grim Reaper: Sirius, who is a skeleton, is dressed like this at the park. He also owns a folding scythe that he uses in combat.
• Hellevator: The service elevator of the park goes down to level -9, which is Hell.
• Hollywood Voodoo: Charlotte specializes in voodoo. She mind-controls people via voodoo dolls and wears bones and shrunken skulls as part of her look, but nothing about her practice involves deities or the forces of nature.
• I Always Wanted to Say That: During Black Friday, Von Bloodt goes on a monster rampage in order to release their soul from the park. When an obnoxious visitor comes to complain to the manager about the situation being unsafe and threatening him with a bad online review, he stabs him and says he's always wanted to do this.
• Insane Troll Logic: Rebecca the skeleton is distraught to find a boy in the women's changing room, as he might see her... uh, her... Let's suppose old habits die hard.
• In-Universe Nickname:
  • Charlotte calls Gretchen Big Nose as an insult. Aurélien calls her Cherry Nose, which she doesn't like much more.
  • Just like in the movie, Lucie as a child couldn't pronounce Gretchen's name and called her Gretunch.
  • Gretchen nicknames Léonie "Buggs", for the rabbit ears.
• Jekyll & Hyde: Tim Matauzier/Astaroth was exorcized in utero, which resulted in him having two bodies for most of his life - a human one living at home with his parents, and a demon one who grew up at Zombillénium. His two bodies fuse back into one when he meets himself at Level -9. They are very much one and the same, but Tim is more passive, while as Astaroth he is more cruel and aggressive - though both versions are kind of cowards.
• Karmic Death: Played with, discussed and subverted at length. As far as Francis is concerned, no on is hired in Zombillénium by chance; only people who sold their soul to the Devil, knowingly or not. Aurélien had vowed to kill the man his wife cheated on him with before getting run over by a car; Hélène was beaten to death by the mob for trying to murder her own son. But being hired in Zombillénium represents being Barred from the Afterlife in an eternity of servitude (of servitude in retail!), as a monster who can never integrate with normal society, whose haunted corpse is transformed in sometimes truly gruesome ways, who starts to burn in hellfire if they're late to clock in, who isn't allowed to go on strike as they're property, who has to clean up vomit and attend happiness management meetings, and if they don't do their job well enough, they're sent to be tortured in Hell for the rest of eternity. And as it turns out, you don't even have to be a sinner or sell your soul to qualify for the job. You just have to die on the park premises.
  Aurélien: You were one hell of a bitch, Hélène. But no one deserves Zombillénium.
• Karmic Transformation: Hélène is very open about how disgusted she is by the undead, and assaults several of them over the course of Book 2. At the end, the mob catching her attempting to kill her own son calls her out for the true monster she is, and kills her. She is then turned into a zombie and has to work at Zombillénium.
• Killed Off for Real:
  • What Gretchen hopes to do to the souls trapped in Hell for all eternity, to allow them to move on to a true afterlife. She eventually succeeds and is able to release her mother, Aton, Aurélien, and any employee who decides to leave the park enceforth.
  • Francis and Jaggar kill each other in a duel at the end of Book 5. As bosses, they were not employees, and therefore both move on to the afterlife without going through Hell.
• Law of Inverse Fertility: Fifteen years ago, Hélène found out that she was pregnant too late to have a legal abortion. She tried to exorcize the fœtus away, but it only resulted in her giving birth to both a human and a demon.
• Meaningful Rename:
  • Charlotte Hawkins used to be Lucie Saxe, Hector's daughter and Gretchen's protégée, before her father moved her to Louisiana.
  • Demons are given biblical names when they step into the soul stock exchange, such as Hector becoming Abaddon or Aurélien becoming Baphomet. Subverted with Tim, who's had his demonic name Astaroth since birth.
• Mr. Fanservice: Aurélien looks like a Calvin Klein model, especially in demon form, but his human form quickly catches up. The park capitalizes on that by dressing him in what can best be described as fetish wear. When he seriously hulks out, he is also fully naked.
• Ms. Fanservice:
  • Déborah Malkewicz, the demon executive who wears tight pantsuits, mini-skirts and maxi-cleavages. To each their own on whether she is more or less fanservice-y while covered in Blood from the Mouth after killing and devouring a guard dog.
  • The witches at the Sabbat Grand Derby are all dressed in bathsuit-type sportswear. Jane adds fishnet thighs, Nina has a huge boob window, and Kwan has several Panty Shots, as well as a pannel constructed to look like she's being taken from behind by the background lightning.
• Missing Mom: Jill sold her soul to Behemoth in exchange for success in her music career, and he impregnated her with Gretchen as a "bonus". When he came back for his daughter, she tried to poison him with holy water, so he dragged her to Hell. Gretchen actually infiltrated Zombillénium to try and find a way to release her.
• Morality Pet: Abaddon has gone straight down the corporate demon pipeline, but his fatherly love for Lucie still tethers him to his humanity.
• "No. Just… No" Reaction: When, after a fiery speech from Sirius about the research he did on Jaggar revealing that he's a corporate beast, that he's going to bleed them dry for numbers, and the he used to be a slave trader before the American Civil war, a clueless union worker suggests that maybe he's really good at improving workflow.
  Sirius: Get out.
• Non-Malicious Monster: Most monsters have murder impulses, but they can learn to control them. The employees of Zombillénium are usually just trying to go about their day, and if they're malicious, it's mainly just to keep their jobs. If Francis was fully in charge, the series would be a quirky workplace comedy; unfortunately the higher-ups did not invest in a soul-sucking park filled with monsters for the fun of it.
• Not Quite Dead: All the monsters at Zombillénium and beyond are dead humans.
• Older Than They Look:
  • In the first scene of the series, the humans at the pub believe that Gretchen is too young to drink or buy cigarettes. She's actually a college graduate in her late twenties.
  • It may be a witch thing, as Jane McAllister from the Sabbat Grand Derby is 49 but doesn't look a minute over 30.
  • Of course, it makes sense for a significant number of the undead. Jaggar, for example, was alive long before the American Civil War.
• Our Demons Are Different: They are Big Red Devils with horns, who can also sprout wings and grow in size, and are able to take human forms. Most of them are part of the soul stock exchange where they invest in literal soul-sucking companies such as Zombillénium. They can sire children on humans, who become witches.
• Our Ghosts Are Different: Yves Belberthel, one of the team managers, is invisible but palatable - in fact when a client gives an employee trouble, he can beat them up uncaught. Newbies can tell he's here by running into him; more experienced employees know him by his booze breath.
• Our Monsters Are Different: They are businesspeople, workers at an amusement park with a labor union, overworked interns...
• Our Witches Are Different: They are born with powers of a contract between a demon and a human - that said, if one of their parents becomes a demon in their lifetime, they can retroactively become witches. They come in ranks (Gretchen is a Basilisc, which is lower than Charlotte who is a Harpy) that are shown on their tattoos - in fact, they tend to be closer to alternative subcultures than to the classic cauldron and pointy hat. Some of them can become head hunters, which means they can buy souls in the name of their demonic parent just by staring at people. They specialize in different sorts of magic (at the SGD, Gretchen does witchcraft, Charlotte voodoo, Nina elementalism, Kwan shamanism, and Jane black magic). There are schools and universities dedicated to them, but Gretchen claims the degrees are useless.
• Our Zombies Are Different: All decayed living corpses are considered zombies, which includes Sirius, who is a skeleton, and Aton, who is a mummy. While they have murderous impulses like all the monsters, they don't particularly yearn for brains, and can express themselves normally.
• Preppy Name: Bohémond Jaggar de Rochambeau.
• Poor Communication Kills: Between the events of the movie and the first book, as Hector and Gretchen's relationship had already begun to sour, she took Lucie to a flying lesson in dangerous weather, and Lucie fell off her broom. Hector saved her, but was convinced that Gretchen had pushed her, and therefore the two immediately vanished from her life. Gretchen was left thinking for years that she had caused her little friend's death, and Lucie that Gretchen had attempted to kill her and that she must take her revenge.
• La Résistance: After Jaggar takes over and makes the working (and therefore living) conditions of the park absolute torture, Von Bloodt, Gretchen and a few other employees create a web of exfiltration and administrative loopholes to break the contracts of the employees without firing them.
• Ret-Canon: The movie came out between the third and fourth book of the comic. Initially meant to be a more faithful adaptation, the screenwriters found that they had a lot of issues with the character of Aurélien, so they altered his backstory and design, gave him a daughter, and renamed him Hector. In the later books of the comics, the movie was included in Gretchen and the park's backstory, with now teenage Lucie having a prominent role and Hector having a couple of cameos, having moved on to the monster corporate world thanks to his demonic nature. It is actually difficult to understand what the deal with Charlotte is without watching the movie.
• Retcon: In the first two books, Francis is actually the COO of the park, while his wife Rose is the CEO. Rose disappears after Book 2, however, and Francis has the entire leadership of the park.
• Revealing Reflection: All the book covers display a close-up of a character that includes a reflection of what's in front of them.
  • Book 1, Gretchen, has Aurélien's demon form reflected in Gretchen's sunglasses.
  • Book 2, Human Resources, has angry locals reflected in the rear-view mirror of Sirius's bike. In the story, he is able to tell the broken glass beneath his bike wheels is a trap by the reflection of people assaulting him in his back.
  • Book 3, Control Freaks, has the camera monitors of the rides reflected in the window behind Jaggar.
  • Book 4, The Air Girl, has Baphomet reflected on Charlotte's hair beads, voodoo doll pins and tongue piercing.
  • Book 5, Black Friday, has vindictive zombies reflected in the window Gretchen just broke through.
  • Book 6, Sabbat Grand Derby, has Gretchen and Charlotte fighting in the Sabbat reflected in Baphomet's sunglasses.
• Sacrificial Lion:
  • Aton is the first employee who gets fired (and therefore sent to Hell) by Jaggar.
  • Francis is Killed Off for Real after slaying Jaggar in duel.
• Short-Lived Leadership:
  • Déborah is made CEO by interim during the short few days between Jaggar's death and the SGD.
  • After the SGD, Astaroth becomes president of Zombillenium for a total of ten seconds as Léonie frightens him into releasing the souls and abdicating in favor of Gretchen. He then goes into HR, and never stops bragging about how he was president at one point.
• Shout-Out:
  • Gretchen tells people that her birth father is Robert Smith. Smith's bandmate Siouxie Sioux is also mentionned by Jill as "having stolen everything from her, even her look".
  • In witchcraft university in England, Gretchen slept with a wizard with round glasses and dark tousled hair named Harry.
  • Jill Webb did an in-universe English cover of Pierre Bachelet's Les Corons, a song about the lives of coal miners in Northern France. The crew listens to it as they try to escape the park through the old coal mines it was built on.
  • The witches participating in the Sabbat Grand Derby are losely inspired by the Spice Girls. They are actually called that as a joke, with Gretchen as Ginger Spice.
• Slavery Is a Special Kind of Evil: All the employees of Zombillénium are "hired for eternity", which means they're essentially slaves. This situation comes into the spotlight when the shareholders give the park to Jaggar, who even used to be a slave-owner before the American Civil War.
• Southern Gothic: Jaggar is a vampire from Louisiana, a literal blood-sucking boss, with no sense of ethic or moral, only looking to improve numbers, and taking pleasure in extra cruelty. According to employee gossip, American vampires are even worse than European ones, because they went and crossed the Atlantic in search of ever more fresh blood - he also used to be a slave-owner. Even before he is named CEO, he exudes danger and is the most threatening character in the series.
• Surprisingly Realistic Outcome:
  • Using a scythe in combat is so cool. Let's just hope no one gets within the length of the blade, least of all someone with a chainsaw.
  • Demons don't invest in amusement parks for the reward of hearing children laugh. The park is meant to pump souls as well as money, and as Von Bloodt is too ethical to kill people and swallow them into the special hell that is Zombillenium, he ends up being demoted by the investors, who replace him with someone more ruthless.
• Time Skip: Five years pass between Book 3 and Book 4.
• Unholy Ground: Zombillénium. The soul of anyone who walks into the premises belongs to the devil; the tickets they buy are actually exit tickets for them to leave unharmed... if they manage. As a bonus, it was built on a cemetery.
• Used to Be a Sweet Kid: Charlotte used to be Lucie, Gretchen's adorable stepdaughter and protégée.
• The Von Trope Family: Francis and Rose Von Bloodt. Older vampires tend to have a particle name, though Jaggar's is de Rochambeau as he hails from French Louisiana.
• Weirdness Censor: Very few humans actually know the truth about Zombillénium. Visitors and inspectors alike think that Aton is just an actor in bandages, or that Sirius is a really well made animatronic, or that Von Bloodt is a regular Joe who's just a little extra about the vampire disguise. Even after the mass murders of Black Friday and the SGD, both of which make national news with a famous reporter being turned into a zombie herself, humans manage to believe that it was all a commercial stint.
• Writers Cannot Do Math: Due to the Ret-Canon. The movie is set five-ish years prior to the Book 1, but in both, Von Bloodt has been the CEO of the park for fifteen years (the date of creation of the park being very relevant, as Astaroth was abandoned as a newborn by his mother on the construction site).
• Young and in Charge: After the SGD, Astaroth becomes president of Zombillenium; at this point of the story, he is in his early twenties at most. After relinquishing the title, he quickly becomes head of HR.
• Younger Than They Look: Jill Webb, who must be in her fifties at most, has a full head of white hair. It was black when Behemoth took her away, so it's a wonder what he did to her before killing her for her to look like this in death.