Origin
When Dr. Edgar Zomboss was a student at Zombie University, he bullied the other students and teachers, cheated his way through tests, stole candy meant for high schoolers, and stole his thesis (Just Step to the Left: Getting around the Tall-Nut Problem) from Pokey Piquenose. He is the youngest student ever to gain a doctorate in Thanatology.
After college, he gathers an army of zombies and attempts to destroy Neighborville time and again. He is always opposed by Crazy Dave, Patrice, Nate, and their own army of sentient powered plants.
He is a megalomaniac, and constantly puts down his zombies for their perceived (and actual) idiocy. He loves to eat warm Pop Smarts, especially in Cherry, Apricot Sundae, and Einstein flavors. He likes to cook them both with a toaster and by lightning bolt. He enjoys watching Zom-Ichi: the No-Brained Swordsman.
Major Story Arcs
Lawnmageddon
Zomboss sends his zombie army into Neighborville to take over, and eat some brains. Their huge numbers give them the advantage, even after Crazy Dave, Patrice, and Nate use their plants to fight back.
Zomboss stays out of sight for most of the invasion, but finally appears with a giant machine that blocks out the sun with huge stinky clouds. The plants’ access to the sun gone, they lose much of their power. However, Dave uses his own machine to blow the clouds away, the plants regain their strength, and together they manage to drive Zomboss and his zombies away.
Zomboss is surprisingly quiet in this arc, and only appears briefly.
Timepocalypse
Dr. Zomboss invents a sun vacuum that will destroy all the plants by depriving them of sunlight. However, once of his zombies drops a Pop Smart into the machine, and it explodes, sending its pieces throughout time. Zomboss sends his zombie army after the pieces, but Crazy Dave, Patrice, and Nate find out about the machine and also go after the pieces.
He sends his zombies to ancient Egypt and a 1979 dance-off, but both times the zombies lose the pieces to Patrice and Nate. He sends zombies to the time of dinosaurs long before Patrice and Nate show up, so they have hundreds of years to search for the piece, but the humans still find it first.
When they go to the future, Zomboss sends out televised messages asking for their capture. In this future, he succeeded in taking over the world by the year 2020. When Nate and Patrice show up, this time he confronts them directly alongside his armyâbut still loses.
He also fails to get the part when he gets directly involved back in pirate times.
When the kids get all the pieces, Crazy Dave tries to build a sun magnifier instead of a sun vacuum. However, Zomboss and his army show up and attack before it’s done. This time they are finally winningâuntil the humans freeze them in a time loop. Crazy Dave finishes his sun magnifier, boosts his plants, and defeats the zombies. Patrice punches Zomboss out, and he is taken away by the Zombie Removal Service.
Bully for You
Zomboss starts off the day with some everyday evil plans, like tying spiders to children and stealing candy from babies. However, as he goes from evil deed to evil deed, people keep recognizing him, and then calling a mysterious figure.
Then he steals the materials to make his new master plan: a globe of Muddlegas that will create a cloud that stupefies everyone, so that the zombies can eat everyone in Neighborville. He confronts Patrice and Nate with his new army, but is interrupted by the Anti-Bully Squad.
The Squad, made up of students that Zomboss bullied in college, is the group that people had been calling all day. They want revenge on Zomboss. They grab him from the scene of battle and bring him to their headquarters. There they remind him of how he used to torment them. Now they will torment him, by stealing his collection of famous toenail clippings, taping over his collection of zombie soap operas, and putting piranhas in Ziggy, his pet goldfish bowl. Worst of all, they’re going to conquer Neighborville before he can.
They persuade Zomboss’s army to join them, and attack Nate, Patrice, and Neighborville.
Zomboss is imprisoned, but he hid a Ultra-Toasty Imp-Powered Heat Ray gun in his jacket. He uses it to warm up his otherwise cold Pop Smarts, and then breaks out to once again terrorize Neighborville. However, Mr. Stubbins leads him into capture again soon after.
The Anti-Bully Squad then go to confront Nate and Patrice directly, but Zomboss closes the door after them, leaving them without their army. Zomboss then gets his original zombie army, and the Squad’s college zombies, under his control and attacks the kids. He cannot break Crazy Dave’s unmeltable ice cream wall, however, and leaves to fight another day.
He forces the Anti-Bully Squad to go back to college again, and forces them to play dodgeball as their gym teacher. He also gets Mr. Stubbins, one of the Squad’s pets, to become his new pet.
Home Sweet Grown
Zomboss discovers that the plants have moved into Dave’s old mansion. He sees that the plants are trying to learn how to fit into normal human society, and wants the zombies to learn how to do this too. He has the zombies infiltrate the mansion and set up some cameras, so when Patrice and Nate teach them skills on acting like humans, the zombies can also learn. While they have predictable trouble in this, they do get better over time, especially after implementing a rewards system in which zombies get a signed photo of himself.
He leads the zombies into town to show how much they have learned, but they run into the plants, and have a contest to see which group an act more like humans, which ends in a tie. They all return to their respective home bases. Zomboss watches Nate and Patrice make plans to defeat the zombies over his camera network, so when they fight, he is able to take the advantage. He puts on a parade, and attacks the town. It looks like he will win, but then Patrice tells him that she has had his base under video surveillance as well, and that Frogpants, Tugboat, and Nigel have been stealing his Pop Smarts. Angered at this base act of treachery, Zomboss turns on his own army, and they lose their initiative against the town.
Petal to the Metal
Zomboss develops a group of souped-up race cars to take over Neighborville–the Black Tornado, Zombie Sledge-Rammer, and Doom-Stuart. They invade town, but Nate, Patrice, and Crazy Dave challenge them to a race. Zomboss accepts, and they race out into the desert. The plants are winning, with their solar-powered cars, although Zomboss does try to stop them with a smoke machine, and his zombie team doesn’t need to sleep. However, Zomboss eventually admits that the whole thing was a distraction, since he left a team of zombies behind to take over Neighborville while the plants are gone. The kids race back to town. As they go, they decide to attack the zombie cars, and successfully destroy them, leaving them in the middle of the desert. Zomboss still has his own car, but the kids confuse him by dropping leaflets promising free brains and free pop smarts, and he doesn’t know where to go.
Meanwhile, Zomboss’s message to the zombies still in town, detailing his plans for them to take over, shuts off halfway through, so they don’t know what to do, and just hang around.
Mr. Stubbins gets the abandoned zombies and brings them back to town, where the kids challenge Zomboss to another race around Neighborville. After various sections of the race, Zomboss attacks with a Massive Munch Machine. Dave counters it with a robot Dino-Pig, and ultimately gets the Munch Machine to slip on a banana and fall to pieces. The kids claim a victory and tell Zomboss to leave town, but he shows them that it was a tie, since Mr. Stubbins was actually riding on the front of the plants’ car when it passed the finish line.
Boom Boom Mushroom
Tired of losing because he always fights fair (at least in his mind), Zomboss decides to upend his strategies and use a hydraulic elevator to drop Neighborville into a system of caves below the surface. He and the zombies walk into Clyde’s Caves, Caverns, and Cupcakes and take over. However, their new underground society requires a lot of extension cords that are wired up to surface electricity, and the kids take notice. They decide to find the mysterious Boom Boom Mushroom and use it to destroy the elevator.
Zomboss keeps having to push his invasion schedule back due to random problems: Nigel pops too much popcorn, which fills the caverns; Tugboat uses the hydraulics to jack up his tugboat; Frogpants get tangled up in the extension cords; a giant pile of dirty laundry fills the tunnel; they can’t find their missing socks. After overcoming these obstacles, Zomboss is finally ready to bring Neighborville down, but instead, the elevator takes him and the zombies up to the surface, where they are defeated by the plants. It turns out that the kids and their pet, Twister, had rewired the elevator.
The Lady in Red (Dark Horse Free Comic Day 2016)
Nate narrates this comic in a parody of film noir, or even more particularly, Sin City (albeit still G-rated). A sunflower is kidnapped by a zombie, and Nate and Patrice track him down. Zomboss tries to use a typical mad-scientist-doomsday device against them, but Nate shoots it with a squirt gun, shorting it out and saving the day.
Garden Warfare
Zomboss creates a portal to the future, and uses mechanical arms to grab advanced technology from the future and bring it back to our time. He first grabs a mechanical butt, from which he extrapolates more breakthroughs. He also continues to grab more technology from the future. With these new resources, he outfits the imps in Z-Mechs, advanced mech suits that are much stronger than normal zombies.
With this new army, he invades Neighborville. The town has been evacuated due to a trick by future-Patrice and âNate, who sent everyone away on an ice cream cruise. The zombies still face resistance from the current and future versions of the kids, from Rose, a sorceress from the past, and from Citron, a plant from the future. However, the zombies are very successful and soon overtake much of the town.
He continues to grab new technology from the future. However, Crazy Dave builds a special frog-burping machine. The sound the burping frogs make cancel out the energy of the time portals, so Zomboss has trouble getting more resources. Furthermore, some odd living garden gnomes that seem to see themselves as protectors of the time stream keep creeping around, with the intent of stopping Zomboss’s machinations with time. Eventually, it seems like the frog-burping machine works well enough that the gnomes no longer feel the need to stop Zomboss themselves, and they leave without ever announcing their presence. Finally, future-Patrice and Citron go to the future and trick Zomboss into grabbing an EM Peach, which explodes upon returning to the present, and destroys all of Zomboss’s future tech.
The plant team quickly defeats him after this. He retreatsâ¦but the original metal butt is still in his possession, and still a potential tool of evil!
Unrest in the Old West (Free Comic Day 2017)
The Plants, their human friends, and the Zombies are transported back in time to the Old West when Tugboat mistakes the time machine for a Pop Smarts Toaster, where they are forced to do chores for Sheriff Tarnation, who has taken their time machine.
Zomboss agrees to work with the humans and plants to get the time machine back as a team.
Zomboss helps by fixing a player piano (and adds some cannons).
When they get the time machine back and return to their own time, Zomboss reneges on his promise and gets ready to attack the plants. However, some random bats and a crazy miner from the Old West fly through the time portal as well, and eat all his Pop Smarts, sinking him too deep into despondency to renew his fight.
Powers and Abilities
Dr. Zomboss is a genius inventor, having created a sun vacuum, multiple time-travelling devices, an imp-powered heat ray, an elevator capable of lowering an entire city below the surface, and Muddlegas, among other things. For example, in “The Lady in Red,” he has a single device that can simultaneously send someone back in time, make them burp uncontrollably, turn their underwear inside out, shrink them to the size of an ant, or make them allergic to sunshine. However, he is constantly out-invented by Crazy Dave.
He has written a variety of books, including How to Not Fight Fair.