Is All of Us Are Dead Worth Reading?

Overview

Cheong-san wakes up to a normal high school morning, and by lunch his school is a kill box. A student infected in a lab accident turns the building into ground zero for a zombie outbreak, and Joo Dong-geun's webtoon spends its 130 chapters on the students trapped inside as the infection spreads faster than anyone in charge can contain, let alone save them. If the premise sounds familiar even if you haven't read a page, that's because Netflix's 2022 adaptation became one of the platform's biggest global hits, and is the reason this webtoon, originally serialized on Naver from 2009 to 2011, finally got a proper English release on WEBTOON.

What it does well

This is a genuinely brutal survival story that doesn't protect its cast the way most ensemble horror tends to. Characters you'd expect a typical genre story to keep around die fast, and often stupidly, which keeps the tension real instead of theatrical. The ensemble is large, but Joo gives enough of the class distinct enough personalities, and different enough reactions to the same crisis, that the story can kill people off and still land the loss instead of it feeling like bookkeeping.

The social commentary underneath the gore also gives the horror an actual point instead of just body count: about class, about how the adults meant to protect these kids abandon them the moment things get dangerous, about who gets to be a hero in a crisis and who gets left behind. It's the kind of thing that could feel heavy-handed in a lesser survival story, but here it's baked into the plot mechanics rather than delivered as commentary on top of them.

Where it falls short

The 2009 to 2011 art hasn't aged as smoothly as the story has. Character designs and paneling read more like typical webtoon-of-that-era work than the polish you'd expect from something this well-known now, and the gap between this and more recent Naver originals is noticeable within the first few chapters. The sheer size of the cast also means some students get thin characterization or disappear from the page for long stretches, and readers coming from the show looking for a specific favorite side character's arc may find the webtoon gives them less room than they'd hoped.

Verdict

Tense, genuinely mean survival horror webtoon that holds up as more than just the thing the Netflix show was based on. Worth reading if you want the story with a sharper, less filtered edge than the adaptation allowed. The dated art is a real but minor tradeoff for that.