So, regarding why "zombie" was off-limits for the Comics Code Authority in the mid-70s, Sasha Wood, delightful smokeshow comics nerd, has a bit of an explainer on the front of this vid. The CCA, as most of us know by now, was established in the '50s as a regulatory bulwark against some kickass pulp horror comics of the time after joyless gatekeeping Christian fuckheads branded them a communist plot against Jesus and wholesomeness or something. In the 1970s, when they finally relaxed the code, as I understand it, the imaginationless vanilla prigs at the CCA STILL took pains to delineate between "proper" horror concepts that had some PROPER literary backstory to it, like books and movies re human-harvesting bloodsucking nobility and pieced-together-cadaverous-abominations of science, versus more prurient or, I don't know, gross horror subject matter like undead shambling rotting flesh-puppets, who were considered sufficiently canonless to make them basically the filthy no-account horror thing from the Wrong Side of the Tracks. So, yes, it is THAT stupid, as pretty much all Jesus-y Proper Society censorship instruments have always been. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TLwwNxfUAq0