Interactive Zombie Art Is The Most Impressive Thing You’ll See All Year

By Nick Venable | Updated

This article is more than 2 years old

It isn’t often that I say, “This is the coolest fucking thing I’ve ever seen,” because I don’t go to Hall and Oates shows often. (Waits for the hilarity to die down.) But seriously guys, I’m pretty sure nothing I’ll visually experience in my life from this point on will ever amaze and delight me as much as I have been for the last half hour, and that’s only chipping a pebble off a mountain.

San Francisco artist George Pfau is a maestro when it comes to zombies, details, and wowing the shit out of people, with years of lecturing, exhibitions, and publications behind him. His latest project, the Zombie Index, is the kind of thing it takes some people a lifetime to achieve, and Pfau is only 30. The Zombie Index, if one can summarize such a thing, is a meticulously detailed doodle painting of thousands of current zombies, future zombies, and other forms of batshittery, all caught in the heat of many different moments. (Orgies and murder!) The image below can give you a sense of the Zombie Index’s scale, but click through to the zoomable, interactive version for the real fun.

00-ZIX-Index-full

There appears to be no rhyme or reason to either the subject matter, the style of drawing, or the color pattern. Much of the painting is in bare black and white, but you won’t even notice because you’ll be too busy eyeballing the department store mannequins next to the pair of disembodied hands making the sign of the devil. Or the guys getting impaled by rainbows. Or “Thriller”-style Michael Jackson. Or the numerous people whose upper bodies are actually just buildings.

But don’t go thinking that the exhaustive amount of insanity stops at the illustration. At the bottom of the picture there is an option to choose “Names,” which takes you to a page with hundreds if not thousands of names of people involved in the world of zombies in some way or another. I assume this, as most of them were unrecognizable. But the mind-blowing part is that anyone who has the pronouns I, me, you, we, or us as a part of their name — example: JaMEs HoUSely — have links to a plethora of zombie-related material across the Internet, from essays to songs to art to film and everything in between.

I’d love to go on about this all day, but I’ve got brains scrambling on the stove. I mean eggs. You know I meant eggs, right? For a little oddball music to go with your picture-looking, here’s a video Pfau directed and wrote the lyrics for, titled “Between I and Us.”