ABSTRACT
First published in 2010, Arthur de Pins’s Zombillénium is a French comic series that is an openly critical metaphor of the power relations between employers and employees, representing workers as zombies at the mercy of vampires and demons. After an animated film adaptation in 2017, Zombillénium took a new turn in its fourth paper instalment: some of the park employees seek to free the souls owned by Behemoth from their work contracts.
Despite the failure, so far, of the attempts at a revolution in Zombillénium, this chapter seeks to assess the extent to which the revolts that are depicted in de Pins’s work crack capitalist realism as described by Fisher. While it questions whether the series itself is able to sustain itself without the economic system it criticises, it also suggests that it does not mean that readers must fall in a helpless left melancholy. Indeed, readers can, rather, choose to realise how pervasive capitalism is, question whether it is really “simply obvious” and take the full measure of how radical a reinvention of society needs to be in order to bring about real change.
