WARNING: The following article contains spoilers for DCeased: Dead Planet #4 by Tom Taylor, Trevor Hairsine, Gigi Baldassini, and Saida Temofonte and Marvel Zombies: Resurrection #2 by Phillip Kennedy Johnson, Leonard Kirk, and Travis Lanham, on sale now.
With Marvel and DC's respective zombie apocalypse stories in full swing, it seemed unlikely that the cure could be found anywhere, let alone in similar places.
Yet somehow, most likely through a strange and admittedly funny coincidence, both Marvel and DC's respective undead apocalypses may have found a way to restore the dead in the most unlikely of sources: Robots.
It's been no secret that Cyborg has the cure for the Anti-Life Equation inside him somewhere. He was the carrier for the initial plague, so it seems fitting that he should be the one to cure it. Having unintentionally unleashed the virus through the internet, most of the human population succumbed within a matter of days. Only after the survivors were evacuated did Cyborg discover the cure was within him. And in DCeased: Dead Planet #4, he learned that all he had to do to distill is was decode his blood. But while the future of this alternate DC Universe rests on developing a cure from Cyborg over in Marvel Zombies: Resurrection, things are not as cut and dry.
Much like DCeased, Marvel Zombies: Resurrection has the apocalypse span for a few years from the outbreak to the present day. During that time, to combat the rising number of undead, humanity turned to automated defenses. Using robots and machines as the first line of defense against the zombies seemed like a sound strategy but over time, the number of undead grew and eventually wiped out most of the humans ordering the machines around. Now the machines are making their own decisions, as well as their own discoveries. In Marvel Zombies: Resurrection #2, the Machine Coalition has been transforming humans they save into robots by way of the Transmode Virus. This virus was designed to alter organic beings into technological ones, to expose human survivors to the Transmode Virus to eliminate the organic factor and prevent the zombie virus from spreading.
So in both universes robots hold the key to preventing the zombie outbreak from getting any worse. DCeased's solution seems kinder and more of a cure than Marvel Zombies', which isn't so much a cure with the cost of the Machine Coalition's cure being exactly what the survivors are trying to protect in their humanity.
Perhaps potential cures for plagues being found in machines is not so much a coincidence, but an insight into the direction of real-world medicine. Humanity is relying more and more on machines to help get through daily life, with medical technology near the forefront and what both DCeased and Marvel Zombies may be implying that mankind may not be able to stop future diseases without their assistance. More ominously, both series offer two looks into how machines might "help" in the future, with one showing the positive, idealized version of technological aid where a cure for all can be created relatively painlessly, and the other showing a darker side of science, where the cure may be worse than the disease.