5 Years Later, Marvel Fans Are Wrong About This Last of Us-Style Series

Finding that perfect sweet spot when crafting a good horror story can be extremely difficult. Lean too far into graphic body horror, and the story risks losing the impact of its narrative under the weight of its gross-out visuals. Lean too far in the other direction, focusing entirely on narrative and atmosphere, and the story could end up boring its readers. Luckily for Marvel, they hit the nail directly on the head with a story released a few years ago. It blended the perfect amount of shocking imagery with light-hearted humor and a fun, positive ending. Unfortunately for Marvel, many fans wrote the series off before giving it a chance, which is a massive shame.

Contagion (by Ed Brisson, Adam Gorham, and Veronica Gandini) is a five-issue miniseries that plunged New York City into the depths of a terrifying fungal outbreak. When Earth’s most powerful heroes were helpless to stop it, the world’s fate seemed incredibly dire. For all of its strengths, Contagion was passed by, with many fans shrugging it off as a The Last of Us knock-off. This couldn’t be further from the truth. Fans of The Last of Us would have a tremendous amount of fun with Contagion. It may follow some similar beats, but Contagion is its own beast through and through and should definitely be given a chance.

A Bizarre Fungal Outbreak Plunges New York City Into Horrifying Chaos

It’s as Bad as It Looks, Too

It all started with The Thing heading into a local bodega. When a young boy pleads with The Thing to come and help his friend, the gruff and weary superhero eventually caves and follows the boy into the depths of the New York City subway system. To his horror, the boy was telling the truth. A terrifying fungal infection has consumed the boy’s friend, and as The Thing learns quickly after, his old foe, the Mole Man.

The Fantastic Four are the first heroes to fall to the bizarre being, the walking epicenter of the fungal outbreak. Soon, the infection erupts onto the streets of New York City, where chaos begins to spread. When even Doctor Strange, Iron Man and the Avengers fall prey to the fungal being – a fact made infinitely worse because the being absorbs the powers and psyches of every being it infects – it’s left to New York’s toughest street-level heroes to set things right.

The fungal outbreak defeated the Thing, Iron Fist, Luke Cage, Jessica Jones, the Punisher, Moon Knight, Elektra, Black Tarantula, and even members of the Wrecking Crew. Just as everything seems bleakest, Moon Knight has a stroke of genius: As he has experience dealing with multiple personalities, he willingly opts to become infected, believing he can maintain a sense of self-control within the fungus.

Moon Knight’s gamble proves successful as he can navigate the surreal collected consciousness of the fungal monster. Freeing the trapped heroes within, Moon Knight leads a charge that defeats the infectious being. Everyone affected is returned to perfect health, Reed Richards creates a cure for the infection in case it ever spreads again, and the fungal being is trapped within a vibranium-infused glass case. The Thing breathes a sigh of relief as he settles back, the terror of the fungal outbreak nothing more than a bad memory.

Contagion Excels as a Horror Story Due To Its Masteful Balancing Act

It’s Scary and Spooky and Funny All At Once

Contagion succeeds as a mini-event for a variety of reasons. To begin with, it’s a wonderful story for Halloween. It features spooky and even grotesque visuals but never jumps the shark and depicts outright gore and dismemberment. It’s scary, but no one involved truly becomes permanently injured. The idea of the fungal outbreak spreading out of control creates a sense of dire urgency, but the entire story is contained within a cordoned section of New York City. The possibility of what could happen if it spreads further makes it scary, but it never overstays its welcome as a worldwide event.

By focusing on street-level heroes, Contagion does away with the more obvious solutions and answers to the threat at hand. While Thor could have just flown above it and blasted it away with giant bolts of lighting until it was smoking ash, or Scarlet Witch could have warped reality around it and turned it into pudding, that would have been too easy a fix. By eliminating the obvious answers to the problem, Contagion allowed its heroes to wrack their brains, using their wit as much as their superpowers, to combat the emergency.

Sometimes, all the guns in the world and all the super-powered punches all amount to nothing in the face of danger. But best of all, Contagion ends positively, with the heroes on top and the danger at an end. It isn’t often that such a story ends so cleanly without a chilling cliffhanger ending, but Contagion pulls it off with aplomb.

They May Be Similar, But Contagion and The Last of Us Are Still Very Different Stories

The Last of Us Didn’t Involve the Fantastic Four For Starters

From the get-go, Contagion shares a huge similarity with The Last of Us in that it features an outbreak of a mind-controlling fungus. Reed Richards himself even states that the organism at the heart of it all resembled cordyceps, the fungus that ran out of control in The Last of Us.

But to say Contagion is just a Last of Us clone is a huge disservice. To begin with, it isn’t actually cordyceps that’s plaguing Marvel’s heroes. Unlike The Last of Us, Contagion’s fungus is a magically enhanced bioweapon formed in K’un-Lun that was unwittingly unleashed on the world. Some people may roll their eyes at the differences, but it’s important to remember that The Last of Us was not the first story to discuss a deadly global outbreak.

Imagine writing off The Walking Dead because it has zombies, and since The Night of the Living Dead did it first, there wouldn’t be any point in reading it, or ignoring all of Anne Rice’s work because Bram Stoker wrote Dracula seventy-nine years in advance.

The same could be said of Contagion. It might share the same premise as The Last of Us, but its plot, execution, tone, and ending are all completely different. All art is derivative, a fact that may rankle fans, but it’s the truth. How that art manages to stand up on its own merit is what matters most. In Contagion‘s case, it boasts enough differences to differentiate itself from The Last of Us well enough to enjoy the story individually.

Fans of Horror Owe It To Themselves to Read Contagion

Maybe We’ll Get a Contagion 2!

Contagion is that special kind of horror story that manages to blend scares, laughs, chills, and hope all in one package. A classic comic book story should always put its heroes on the ropes; if there are no stakes, there’s no suspense or gasp-inducing danger to propel readers to turn to the next page.

Contagion has thrills in spades, but like all great comic book stories, it knows when to call it quits. It didn’t spill into a sprawling cross-over event, it didn’t result in gruesome deaths that would have to be retconned and rewritten a few years later, and it didn’t bank off gory visuals alone to tell a compelling horror story. It’s short and sweet, straight to the point, and puts the A-Listers on the back burner.

It cannot be stressed enough that it is not a rip-off of The Last of Us. As was previously stated, fans of The Last of Us owe it to themselves to read Contagion as it offers a much more lighthearted take on its premise. If Contagion had become a maxi-series that told the tale of how The Thing was forced to travel a plague-blighted land, searching endlessly for a cure to the world’s lethal infection, sure, compare it more strongly to The Last of Us.

If it had devolved into a grisly run full of body counts and extreme body horror, then sure, the parallels could be drawn. Contagion did none of those things, though, and is all the better for it. It’s a story that would fit perfectly in the classic Marvel Graphic Novel series or as a prose short within the pages of Zombie Tales. Contagion hearkens back to classic Marvel Horror in the best ways, and it deserves more credit for it.