One of my favorite courses to teach is an upper-division literature and film course in adaptation studies. I use Christa Albrecht-Crane and Dennis Cutchins’ excellent collection Adaptation Studies: New Approaches (2010) as my primary theoretical textbook, and my students and I are particularly attracted to the way the collection complicates the process of adaptation beyond mere fidelity and text-to-text adaptive binaries; in particular, I find Thomas Leitch’s ideas concerning infidelity (66), Pamela Demory’s descriptive metaphor of the tapestry (123), and Cutchins’ exploration of “convergent evolution” (181) to be of particular value to undergraduates who are just starting to expand their analytical skills beyond the reductive “the book was better” approach adopted by most bloggers and Internet Movie Database reviewers. In essence, those who adapt a narrative from one text to another—with notable shifts in medium, audience, and rhetorical purpose—have an ethical obligation to create something new (see Leitch 66), and that new product is as much the result of a system of adaptive influence as it is from the (alleged) source material. As I have repeatedly taught and pondered these concepts, I have developed my own allegorical model for understanding the multi-nodal nature of textual adaptations, one that directly engages in my primary field of academic investigation—zombie studies—which makes my theory on multi-nodality, in itself, multi-nodal.

My case study, by which I hope to illustrate my approach to multi-nodal adaptations, is Diane Ruggiero-Wright and Rob Thomas’s iZombie (2015–2019), a surprisingly realistic zombie-themed crime series that has its origins in the diverse world of a supernatural comic book series. Back in 2010—perhaps not coincidentally, the year The Walking Dead (Frank Darabont, 2010–2022) premiered on the AMC television network1—writer Chris Roberson and illustrator Michael Allred created an ostensibly original zombie narrative for the Vertigo imprint of DC Comics. Their iZOMBIE (2010–2012),2 a 28-issue comic series that attempted to reinvent the living-dead monster made so famous by George A. Romero, stars a sentient zombie protagonist, an “agent” (Derksen and Hick 15) who maintains her human consciousness and subjectivity by consuming fresh human brains. Gwen Dylan is a tough and independent young zombie woman, part of a grave digging team that works at a “green” cemetery in Eugene, Oregon, a situation that enables her to obtain the fresh brain she requires each month without resorting to murder.3 She covertly lives in a crypt that she shares with Eleanor, a ghost from the 1960s who remains hopelessly out of touch with modern culture, and they hang out regularly with their friend Scott, a “were-terrier” who secretly transforms into a kind of “dog lycanthrope” each full moon (see Figure 1). The trio would prefer to stay out of trouble and in the shadows, but Gwen’s monthly brains come with strings attached: whenever she consumes the mind of a dead person, she is overwhelmed by that person’s memories, and the voice of the dead fills her head, insisting she right some wrong—“[S]creaming out for justice. For vengeance”—or resolve some unfulfilled wish or desire—such as telling a grieving widow her husband loved her (Roberson and Allred, Dead to the World).

Admittedly, this take on the zombie narrative tradition provides fans of the subgenre with what appears, at first glance, to be an original story starring a colorful cast of likable characters. However, iZOMBIE actually represents what I have called an “assemblage adaptation,” an “innovative and thorough blending[] of multiple existing antecedents, where the different ‘vintages’ combine in new ways to create perceptively new narratives and unique . . . experiences” (Bishop 264).4 In other words, rather than being a fully original concept, Roberson and Allred’s comic series draws upon a number of notable source texts and inspirations beyond merely the pre-existing zombie narrative tradition. For example, it’s not too much of a stretch to see in Gwen, Ellie, and Scott the equally dynamic triad at the center of Joss Whedon’s cult favorite Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997­–2003), recreating Buffy (Sarah Michelle Gellar), Willow (Alyson Hannigan), and Xander (Nicholas Brendon), respectively. Indeed, the second volume of iZOMBIE, “uVAMPIRE,” blatantly presents Gwen and her friends in terms of the crime-solving Scooby-Doo gang, a separate antecedent text but also a clear analog to Buffy’s team of supernatural combatants, made overt in the television series by the self-applied label of the “Scoobies.” Perhaps even more directly, Gwen, Ellie, and Scott also recall the supernatural roommates of the BBC series Being Human (2008–2013, created by Toby Whithouse)—which similarly features a vampire, a ghost, and a werewolf5—itself a text that was later adapted for American viewers (by Jeremy Carver and Anna Fricke) in 2011 for the Syfy network. In other words, the creation of iZOMBIE did not take place in an artistic vacuum; like so many postmodern narratives, it cannot help but exist as a palimpsestuous convergence of multiple preexisting texts, characters, and storylines, especially those already proven to be popular with its perceived target audience.

Nevertheless, despite these obvious antecedents, iZOMBIE does add much to the supernatural subgenre, particularly the concept of “oversouls” and “undersouls.” According to the supernatural mythology of the comic, a dead body that continues to house the ego-like oversoul results in a vampire; a body animated by nothing more than an id-like undersoul is merely a mindless zombie.6 The mysterious mummy, Amon, explains to a perplexed Gwen how “[t]he oversoul, seated in the brain, contains the thoughts, memories, and personality—what modern science calls ‘the conscious mind.’ The undersoul, seated in the heart, contains the appetites, emotions, and fears—‘the unconscious mind’” (Roberson and Allred, Dead to the World). Gwen, however, is a corpse driven by both, making her technically a “revenant” (which thus, admittedly, undermines the title of the series). Yet even these innovations to the genre are manifestations of additional source texts, most obviously the classic psychoanalytic theories of Sigmund Freud, along with references to, and thus (arguably) adaptations of, Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essay “The Over-Soul” and Michael McClure’s poem “Dark Brown” respectively. Roberson and Allred thus demonstrate their ingenuity by offering readers a new way to think about the entire pantheon of supernatural monsters, proposing a taxonomy that is not only inventive but also a driving force behind iZOMBIE’s complex plot structure.

These diverse and often explicitly embraced textual inspirations—most of them completely unrelated to the zombie oeuvre—ensure the comic contributes a new vision of the flesh-eating zombie to the growing cannon of the subgenre, one that naturally represented a valuable source commodity to the entertainment industry. Even though iZOMBIE ended its limited run in 2012—after resolving Gwen’s successful efforts to save the world from a sorority of vampires, a narcissistic mummy, an ancient guild of monster hunters, a covert government agency made up of undead super soldiers, a megalomaniacal Frankensteinian-golem scientist, and a Cthulhu-like world-eating monster7—it didn’t take long for television producers to recognize the economic potential of adapting the series into a cinematic, live-action show. In 2015, Diane Ruggiero-Wright and Rob Thomas developed iZombie (2015–2019) for the CW network, yet the resultant series retains few connections to its professed source material. While the TV show’s protagonist zombie does indeed retain her human consciousness by eating fresh brains as in the comic, she is now a coroner’s assistant instead of a grave digger, her friends are dreamy young mortals instead of supernatural creatures, and she solves all-too-realistic murders instead of engaging with evil paranormal forces—in fact, Ruggiero-Wright and Thomas even changed the titular protagonist’s name from Gwen to the groan-inducing “Liv Moore” (played by Rose McIver). Indeed, this successful WB television series bears almost no resemblance to the source text referenced in its weekly opening credits; like the 2013 film World War Z (directed by Marc Forster, presented as an ostensible adaptation of Max Brooks’ 2006 novel), the value of the property seems to be invested in the title of the antecedent material alone—a bankable way to capitalize on an established and known property while preserving almost unlimited creative potential. Instead of simply translating the comic from the page to the small screen, Ruggiero-Wright and Thomas have created a new narrative vehicle, one that draws from many inspirations and antecedents. In fact, rather than being the advertised adaptation of the comic, I contend iZombie has the most in common with Thomas’s earlier television success, Veronica Mars (2004–2007).

Because Ruggiero-Wright and Thomas’s iZombie shows little interest in engaging directly and faithfully with the mythology, characters, plot points, or story lines of Roberson and Allred’s comic iZOMBIE, I suggest the television series is better analyzed in terms of its multi-nodal sources and inspirations. In fact, in a delightful flair of postmodernism, iZombie can be seen not as an adaptation of the comic at all but primarily as the zombic resurrection of Thomas’s earlier series, and, as such, it functions as an ideal example of an adaptation and an adaptive process that drifts markedly from its source due to far stronger and more pervasive influences. Rather than being a text one can locate at the end of a unidirectional path of adaptation—that is, a single source text that has been translated, reconfigured, and remade into a single, recognizable, and faithful version of that source in a different medium—iZombie represents a narrative produced by many nodal touch points and (inter)textual influences, one not only affected by the mammoth presence of the series Veronica Mars—itself a nodal, assemblage adaptation in its own right (see Bishop 264)—but also by additional antecedent forces. As such, iZombie works as a case study for understanding multi-nodal adaptations, illustrating how many (if not all) texts in our postmodern world defy traditional one-to-one linear adaptation paths and represent a more complicated productive process. In particular, such a text system demonstrates the way the path towards an idealized—and admittedly unreachable—“faithful adaptation” is always and unavoidably redirected because of the powerful gravitational forces of other preexisting texts, trends, markets, and influences.

One way to approach the television series iZombie as an adapted text is in terms of a densely interwoven tapestry of creative influences, the source comic and Veronica Mars representing just two of them. Demory, in her analysis of the many popular adaptations of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, argues how adaptations cannot avoid their fundamentally intertextual nature: “a twenty-first-century Pride and Prejudice must necessarily be in some kind of intertextual relationship with the prior versions—hypertexts of the novel—and with other associated cultural phenomena. . . . For the twenty-first-century reader and filmgoer, then, even Austen’s text is no longer only Austen’s text” (123). Applying this theoretical lens to iZombie, then, provides the scaffolding necessary to deconstruct the television series into its disparate parts, parts that include such things as the source comic, the zombie narrative tradition, the demographic and marketing trends of most concern to the WB network, Ruggiero-Wright and Thomas’s artistic and creative visions, Veronica Mars, and more. Demory goes on to structure this intertextual approach in metaphorical terms, claiming that such text systems most often result in creative products that are best understood as “thick tapestr[ies], comprising not just [the source material], but numerous other filmic and literary texts, and colored by various genre conventions, reader and viewer expectations, and market forces” (123). With this visual model, she thus conceives of texts as “piece[s] of woven art continually in the process of being made—altered, embroidered, enlarged—with new threads sewn in and around the old, continually making new patterns and enlivening and changing the old images” (123). As with all adaptations—and otherwise original texts, in fact—iZombie can thus be understood as a product created from the interweaving of other influences, a process that results in a living narrative that engages simultaneously with past influences and future innovations.

Because Ruggiero-Wright and Thomas’s executively produced series shares the same title as Roberson and Allred’s comic book series, iZOMBIE represents, not surprisingly, the primary, foundational threads of this adaptive textile. While not all successful adaptations retain the title of their source material—take, for example, Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend (1954), which has been adapted cinematically under three different titles over the years: The Last Man on Earth (1964, directed by Ubaldo Ragona and Sidney Salkow), The Omega Man (1971, directed by Boris Sagal), and I Am Legend (2007, directed by Francis Lawrence)—the reuse of a precise title makes certain promises to an audience in terms of adaptation. A television series titled iZombie cannot help but evoke the specter of the comic book, especially among those fans already familiar with the earlier text. Beyond the superficiality of the title, however, the series manifests other overt connections with Roberson and Allred’s comic. For example, iZombie repeatedly employs animation to affect a visual representation of a comic book, which emphasizes its creative lineage (see Figure 2). The opening credits sequence provides viewers a recap of Liv’s origin story, constructed from illustrated still images framed as comic book panels and filmed with a roaming camera that implies the source material is literally being shot to create the sequence.8 Additionally, every time the show returns from a commercial break, the action begins with a brightly illustrated still frame, as from a comic, that smoothly morphs into a live-action shot. In other words, despite the change in medium, Ruggiero-Wright and Thomas consciously code the television show as a kind of comic book, or at least as the deliberate adaptation of one.

Beyond these rather overt stylistic connections with the originating comic series, iZombie has, admittedly, other elements in common with its literary antecedent, as would be expected from Warner Brothers’ purchasing the rights to Roberson and Allred’s intellectual property. The strongest connection that remains between the two versions of the narrative is the unusual nature of Liv’s zombiism, a variation on Romero’s mythology that allows the series to employ a conscious protagonist logically. Like Gwen before her, Liv has to eat fresh human brains to retain her subjective control, cognitive abilities, and memories, and those brains do imbue her with a memorial connection to the dead. However, in the source comic, Gwen’s cerebral diet results in a kind of haunting: she hears the voices of the dead in her head as they insistently badger her to complete unfulfilled tasks for them from beyond the grave, and she finds herself creating paintings of the flashes of memories that would otherwise overwhelm her. In the television series, on the other hand, Liv primarily sees only these flashes of the dead person’s memories, presented to viewers of the show in the form of subjective point-of-view shots filmed with cloudy, disorienting filters and other special effects. The memories sometimes appear to cause Liv pain, as they overwhelm her with the final moments of the victim’s life—conveniently enough, for the narrative structure of the series, almost always a violent death at the hands of another. Instead of hearing the voice of the dead in her head, Liv actually takes on the victim’s personality and abilities—such as kleptomania and the ability to speak Romanian (Thomas)—channeling the dead in a way more akin to a possession than a mere haunting. This addition to the premise of the comic affords the series many opportunities for comic relief and a “variation on a theme” weekly episodic structure, but it does represent a marked departure from the way the comic handles its unique premise.

If iZombie were a direct, faithful adaptation of Roberson and Allred’s comic, the television series would simply recreate that source in its entirety, with little to no variation and with no additional inspirations or influences, perhaps even using the comic book as a kind of storyboard. Instead, though, the series draws upon many additional sources, creating the dense, postmodern, intertextual tapestry that makes it so interesting as a case study of adaptation. For example, the cold opening of the pilot episode of iZombie drastically departs from the comic, seeming to set up a standard, tried-and-true “medical dramatic romance,” in the tradition of a series such as Grey’s Anatomy (2005– , created by Shonda Rhimes and Michelle Lirtzman), and the framework of the medical subgenre continued to influence the romantic subplots of the series. However, Liv quickly finds herself in the middle of a violent and existence-ending zombie outbreak, which Ruggiero-Wright and Thomas portray largely in the Romero tradition—so much so that, after rising as a zombie the next day, she purchases a copy of Night of the Living Dead (1968) on DVD as a kind of “owner's manual” for her new existence (Thomas). As Liv efficiently establishes the nature of her malady, the audience learns she only eats brains, in the tradition of Dan O’Bannon’s Return of the Living Dead (1985) instead of Romero’s cannon, and her condition is scientifically biological rather than supernatural. Liv has been “infected” by a designer drug called “Utopium,” a human-made virus directly reminiscent of Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later (2002)—in fact, Liv even mentions that film by name in the pilot episode, once again overtly declaring and embracing the source threads Ruggiero-Wright and Thomas interwove in their creation of the series.

And yet iZombie is much more than just a medical romance series or a traditional zombie narrative. As a primetime series airing on the Warner Bros. network and seeking the most desirable of all viewing demographics, iZombie is strongly influenced by, if not an overt imitation of, other popular television series. For example, Liv abandons her dream of becoming a doctor and finds employment in the hospital morgue instead, giving the series a definite taste of the Fox Network dramatic romance Bones (2005–2017, created by Hart Hanson). Like Dr. Temperance “Bones” Brennan (Emily Deschanel), Liv possesses remarkable forensic skills—albeit grounded in the clairvoyant side effects of her cranial diet, not in science and intellectual genius—and she uses her insights to aid Detective Clive Babineaux (Malcolm Goodwin) in his police investigations, much as Bones helps FBI Special Agent Seeley Booth (David Boreanaz), but without the romantic subplot. Because Liv is overwhelmed by the memories of the murder victims whose brains she eats, she must work closely with Babineaux, along with the assistance of medical examiner Ravi Chakrabarti (Rahul Kohli), to solve these crimes—conveniently, one each week—through formal procedural means, reminiscent of the hugely successful Crime Scene Investigation franchise.9 In both cases, these antecedent threads represent Ruggiero-Wright  and Thomas’s wise decision to capitalize on particularly popular television subgenres, taking the loose premise of the iZOMBIE comic book and translating it into something more reassuredly marketable.

Beyond simply working within established legal systems to solve murders and combat criminal efforts, Liv, as I have already partially demonstrated, builds a coalition of crime fighters around her, friends who share her “secret identity” and support her efforts (see Figure 3). In addition to Ravi, who quickly figures out Liv is more than just a pale and idiosyncratic former med student, and Babineaux, who initially believes Liv is merely an insightful psychic, Liv has the support of others in her life, friends who help her not only with her professional efforts but also with her increasing complicated personal life. These characters fit the expected mold for a series airing on the WB, as does their casting: Major Lilywhite (another Dickensian name, played by Robert Buckley), Liv’s ex-fiancé and fellow zombie; Peyton Charles (Aly Michalka), Liv’s best friend, one-time roommate, legal counsel, and confidant; and Eva Moore (Molly Hagen), Liv’s largely clueless mother. At the beginning of the series, none of these characters possess any supernatural identities or abilities, making the dynamics of these “Scoobies” akin to those found in the early seasons of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, although they develop and become more formidable as iZombie progresses, in much the same way Buffy’s friends do in her series. Furthermore, Liv’s quasi-antagonist in the show, at least initially, is a bleached-blond undead criminal, Blaine (David Anders), who bears more than a passing resemblance to Buffy’s Spike (James Marsters),10 establishing one more creative thread drawn from that powerful inspirational influence. And, as I’ve already intimated, the CW network itself represents a fundamental antecedent for iZombie: The show features young and beautiful people doing exciting and dangerous things to improve the world and find true love, and because of Liv’s enhanced abilities, which she uses to fight crime, the series fits in nicely with the network’s established obsession with superhero narratives.11

iZombie is thus a colorful and interwoven tapestry of concepts, a new cloth composed of many recognizable antecedent threads—some overt, others subtle; some intentional, others the result of an ephemeral zeitgeist—which means the path to the completed television adaptation was anything but straightforward. Demory’s metaphorical model demonstrates how a multi-source process can actually improve an ostensibly adapted text because infidelity, when practiced appropriately, can add value to the resultant product. In his analysis of Tony Scott’s 2004 film Man on Fire, Cutchins proposes just this kind of path to improvement, claiming the movie should be considered less in terms of an adaptation of A. J. Quinnell’s (Briton Phillip Nicholson) 1980 novel of the same name and more as a retelling of George Stevens’s 1953 film Shane (itself an adaptation of Jack Schaefer’s 1949 novel), especially in terms of theme and meaning. According to Cutchins, “this adaptation, far from being handicapped by its movement away from the Quinnell text and closer to Shane, has become a much more interesting and complex film, particularly in terms of its treatment of spirituality and violence, because of its ‘infidelity’” (181). The key concept here is that of movement, the idea that the adaptive process is a trajectory, a path that navigates various influences and antecedents. After providing a number of examples demonstrating strong connections to Shane, Cutchins claims “director Tony Scott and writer Brian Helgeland made at least an unconscious effort to bend Quinnell’s story to fit the pattern that had been set fifty years earlier by Shane” (185, emphasis added). The visual image Cutchins conjures by explaining intertextual adaptive relationships in the terms of “bending” provides us an additional metaphor by which we can better understand a complex text such as iZombie.

When I teach Cutchins’ chapter from Adaptation Studies in my class, I take his imagery of movement and bending even further, developing what I think is a useful conceptual model for understanding the trajectory of the adaptive process in terms of an interstellar journey, of sorts, one determined by the “gravitational forces” of larger, more established planetary bodies. My conceptual thinking—which also often functions in terms of a tapestry of interwoven antecedents and inspirations—has been further catalyzed by a scene from the 1994 Star Trek film, Generations (directed by David Carson). While analyzing the trajectory of a “space ribbon” in the Enterprise’s stellar cartography room, Commander Data (Brent Spiner) reveals how the path of any object through space is largely determined by gravitational forces, forces that can pull ships off course and which thus require course corrections when those forces are altered. In Generations, the myopically driven Soran (Malcolm McDowell) has destroyed a star to change the course of the ribbon, redirecting it to serve his nefarious purposes. Upon re-screening the film within the context of Cutchins’s theories, I considered how the process of adaptation can be seen in terms of just such a manipulation of a text’s “course,” and that adaptation theorists could benefit from analyzing their subjects from just this perspective. While this allegory of process is admittedly a bit dramatic, I find it a useful one for students to understand that all adaptations—regardless of authorial intent—are unavoidably influenced by a variety of powerful forces that invariably determine the outcome of the adaptive efforts that produce them.

Were Ruggiero-Wright and Thomas attempting to produce a faithful adaptation of iZOMBIE for television—and I am not remotely claiming that was ever their artistic intent—they would of course have been prevented in that idyllic goal by a variety of textual, intertextual, and extratextual factors. At the very least, comics and television are different media, so a truly faithful adaptation would be, of course, impossible (see Albrecht-Crane and Cutchins 15). But, at the risk of advocating a myopic insistence on fidelity, the iZombie television series has far more in common with Veronica Mars than it does the iZOMBIE comic books (see Figure 4). For example, Veronica Mars also focuses on the crime-fighting efforts of a young, plucky, and intelligent woman (Kristen Bell), albeit a private investigator instead of a medical examiner’s assistant. The episodes of both series unfold subjectively via voice-over narration from this female protagonist, a woman who has recently had her life dramatically altered due to the transformative results of physical violation (Veronica’s rape and Liv’s similarly coded zombic infection). In both series, the weekly formula remains largely the same: the protagonist solves a stand-alone case—hiding somewhat in the shadows behind an older, male authority figure (Veronica’s father [Enrico Colantoni] and Babineaux)—using revelatory images (photos in Veronica’s case and memories in Liv’s), and both women surround themselves with resourceful friends and professionals who use their varying expertise to help her solve cases and fight crime. Indeed, I believe these various points of similarity alone support my contention that iZombie is as much a reboot of Veronica Mars as it is an adaptation of iZOMBIE, if not more so.

Such a claim is hardly a rhetorical leap, though, as most of Thomas’s fans likely associate him first and foremost with his earlier series. Indeed, as Dan Solomon says in his 2015 piece on Thomas for Fast Company, “Thomas is and will always be the man who gave the world much-beloved television . . . detective Veronica Mars[, and] when Rob Thomas’s name comes up . . . [people are] thinking ‘blonde detective.’” In his interview with Thomas, Solomon reveals how many of iZombie’s ties to Veronica Mars are not only legitimate but also intentional. “I think about Veronica Mars a lot when we’re doing iZombie,” Thomas told Solomon. “I worry about it. I have some fear that the reductive thinking could be: ‘petite, blonde crime-fighter with first-person narration. It’s just Veronica Mars, but she’s dead!” As my argument is hopefully demonstrating, Thomas is correct in these concerns; however, I don’t wish simply to present a criticism of the similarities between the two television series, of which there are many. As Thomas goes on to say,

We talked a lot about Liv having the textbook quarter-life crisis that so many people that age are going through now. . . . Liv . . . kept her head down, made good grades, dated the nice boy, had her life charted, and then she gets to this place and the rug is ripped out from under her. We keep being interested in stories that underline that very zeitgeist notion that a lot of her generation are going through, and it’s a common thing: Those quality jobs that were supposed to be waiting for people who did all the right things that simply aren’t there, and Liv isn’t getting what she wanted to do, either. (qtd. in Solomon)

If Veronica Mars is anything, it’s a character study that responded to the zeitgeist of the time, one that created a likable, realistic character with whom the target audience could readily identify. With iZombie, Thomas was clearly trying to recreate that successful formula for a new generation and, wisely, with a new, more contemporarily resonant, character type.

However, Thomas protests perhaps a bit too much in his efforts to distance his current project from the one that established his professional reputation. According to Solomon’s reporting, “Veronica Mars was [ultimately] a show about getting to the truth above all else—regardless, even, of whom that hurt. iZombie is about very different things. Veronica was abandoned by her friends and wanted revenge, but Liv finds herself avoiding the life she led prior to the pilot to spare her friends and family from harm.” While this assessment may be true of the initial episodes of the series, Liv does, nonetheless, focus—almost obsessively, thanks to the possessive nature of the brains she ingests each week—on justice, justice for those who have died of unnatural causes, but also justice for those who have so drastically changed her life and for her friends and family, to whom she does, in fact, remain very close. Another point of contact between the two shows, as I have mentioned previously, is the definitive use of voiceover narration. However, according to Solomon’s reporting, “The voiceover serves a different purpose on iZombie than it did on Veronica Mars, too. On Mars, the voiceover was deployed very specifically. ‘I wanted noir. I wanted to recall this Raymond Chandler sort of thing. I think if you watch iZombie, the voiceover shrinks and shrinks and shrinks,’ [Thomas] says.” While I concede this difference in deployment may be valid, I find the very use of voiceover as a driving force of the narrative in terms of the protagonist’s personal perspective and journey to be an essential point of similarity, not of difference.

While Thomas never denies the similarities iZombie shares with Veronica Mars, he does support my earlier claims of the series being an intentional departure from the source material thanks, in large part, to additional sources and inspirational texts. For one, Thomas notes he was markedly inspired by Warm Bodies (2013, directed by Jonathan Levine),12 if not in content, at least in marketability. “I don’t want to undersell the amount of confidence that Warm Bodies gave me going into this,” Thomas told Solomon. “I don’t know how confident I was [before that]. But since I was thoroughly entertained by Warm Bodies, I thought, Yes, it’ll work. It worked on me, hopefully America will buy it.” Additionally, Thomas nods towards Romero’s cannon as being a source of inspiration, especially in the look and behavior of the zombies in iZombie that fail to eat fresh human brains regularly enough to maintain their human consciousness. But Solomon reveals how Thomas was very intentional in his dismissal of much of the comic book’s content, for “Thomas loves zombie stories, but only a very specific kind—and that’s what he’s most interested in exploring in iZombie. The Vertigo series included ghosts, mummies, and were-terriers, but the TV version is straight (fake) science.” Rather than embracing—or even acknowledging—the supernatural elements (and thus characters) found in the comic series, Thomas instead turned his creative mind to a zombie tradition that includes films such as 28 Days Later, 28 Weeks Later (2007, directed by Juan Carlos Fresnadillo), and World War Z. For Thomas, it really came down to what he, personally, preferred in terms of zombie narratives: “I have a hard time with the supernatural in my mind,” Thomas admitted to Solomon. “All the zombie things that I like are the fake science, rather than the supernatural. . . . I know we’re using dorky fake science, but it grounds it in a way.” In his interview with Solomon, then, Thomas admits to allowing forces beyond Roberson and Allred’s comic to influence his creative decisions; in fact, he openly rejects the premise, character, storyline, and general content of iZOMBIE in favor of the formulaic narrative structure that made him a successful television showrunner in the first place.

With this dyadic case study in mind—the comparative analysis of the iZombie television show with its comic precursor—I propose a new metaphor for the adaptive process that combines my ideas with Demory’s and Cutchins’, a trajectory model that I am mostly advocating in terms of its pedagogical value. In class, I encourage my students to imagine the adaptation process as a journey through outer space, with the creative team housed safely inside a spaceship (a spaceship piloted by the showrunner, but including a crew of writers, producers, and directors, along with passengers such as market forces, the targeted network, and the desired audience). This vessel begins on a planet that represents the primary source material—in this case, the comic series iZOMBIE—with the desired destination being a planet that, ostensibly, represents a faithful adaptation of that source material into a different medium. The course of the ship, however, cannot be a straight shot, as many large and powerful gravitational bodies lie between the source text and its adaptation. As the ship navigates its way through space, through the creative processes of adaptation, it is pulled back and forth among these influences—in the case of iZombie, pulled one way by the viral zombies of 28 Days Later, another by the CSI franchise, and yet another byBuffy the Vampire; Veronica Mars is perhaps best represented as a black hole, a force so powerful that even if Thomas had wanted to pilot his craft in a different direction, he was unable to, finding himself (consciously, unconsciously, or both) pulled off course. In other words—at least in the context of this model as I teach it to my students—the legendary planet “Fidelity” is always unobtainable, and with iZombie, Thomas’s ship ended up landing on a different planet altogether, one that he christened “iZombie the Television Series” for his faithful passengers who found themselves on its uncharted surface (see Figure 5).

As a metaphorical model, I realize this idea of the creative journey of adaptors has some conceptual flaws; at the very least, it oversimplifies the process and robs the creative agent of all intentionality. However, I have found it to be a valuable way to stimulate discussion and to encourage my students to see the texts they engage with on a daily basis in a more sophisticated way, especially when I draw a particularly complicated network of “planetary nodes” on the whiteboard for my crude spaceship to navigate among. Additionally, the two texts at the heart of this case study are obviously independent works of fiction—and I’m not arguing that they shouldn’t be—but they are both driven by a chief, unavoidable concern. As a television series, iZombie is, perhaps above all, a commodity. While I’m sure Ruggiero-Wright and Thomas have some aspiration to creative cinematic art, they are surely invested in making money. The iZOMBIE name represented a bankable commodity, a branded title available for purchase, and if the The Walking Dead on AMC has taught us anything, it’s that zombie comic books can result in extremely successful television series.

Because all adaptations draw upon a preexisting text, referent, or inspiration, they all owe something of their existence to another, antecedent source—and more often than not, I argue, this allegiance is likely split among multiple antecedents. On the one hand, then, when an adaptation shares its title with another textual source, the new text invariably makes a certain promise to viewers, establishing a horizon of expectations that the adaptors must have some obligation to fulfill. So while Leitch is correct to emphasize that “adaptation depends on infidelity” (66), some fidelity should surely be expected from a property openly marketing itself as an adaptation of established source material, and in this regard, I consider iZombie to be something of a failure. On the other hand, however, the adaptive process is also a creative one, and any adaptation (aside from, perhaps, an exercise in fidelity such as Gus Van Sant’s Psycho [1998]), must also be considered a new, original text—or at least one that assembles other materials in a way that preserves some “taste” of the sources while nonetheless establishing itself as a new combination of old flavors. In this case, iZombie is a tremendously effective case study of multi-nodal adaptation, one that provides students and scholars alike a more effective way to analyze adaptations than merely the 1:1 fidelity test.