Faith Erin Hicks - The Last of Us: American Dreams #3, p. 20 (Dark Horse, 2013)

Not being a gamer, I wasn't familiar with The Last of Us until the HBO series debuted in January. I wasn't sure if the world was ready for another zombie apocalypse show so soon after the end of The Walking Dead's 11-season run, but, TLOU Season 1 was so well done that it quickly became my favorite recent season of television.

TLOU the videogame was initially released in June 2013, and a tie-in prequel comic book, The Last of Us: American Dreams, was published between April and July 2013. The series was written by TLOU creator Neil Druckmann and co-written and drawn by artist Faith Erin Hicks.

The 4-issue series filled in some of Ellie's backstory, which had been scrapped as a sequence in the videogame. In the series, Ellie is depicted as a student in the Boston quarantine zone who befriends another girl at the school, Riley Abel. The pair sneak out of the school one night and first help, and are then captured by the Fireflies, a rebel group opposing the quarantine zone authorities. Along the way, they are nearly bitten by the Infected - zombie-like humans who have been infected by a mutated strain of the Cordyceps fungus.

The prequel is part of TLOU canon, and a number of scenes in the HBO series were more or less lifted straight from it, perhaps most importantly the introduction of Riley who features prominently in the flashback episode "Left Behind" (S1:E7).

Pictured: Original comic book artwork to The Last of Us: American Dreams #3, page 20 (Dark Horse Comics, June 2013) by Faith Erin Hicks. Interior story by Neil Druckmann and Faith Erin Hicks. The page features Ellie, Riley, the Fireflies (in shadow) and two of the Infected. This is one of only a handful of pages in the series to feature the Infected.