See if this sounds familiar: A skillfully rendered sequence of black-and-white drawings tells the tale of everyday people caught in the middle of a plague, surrounded on all sides by skeletal, undead monsters. This work has become famous, has influenced other artists, and has been reprinted in a variety of different editions.

Now, imagine it’s nearly five hundred years old.

Long before the dead shambled in comics such as Robert Kirkman’s The Walking Dead, they danced in a series of forty-one engravings by the artist Hans Holbein the Younger. First published in 1538, Holbein’s Dance of Death was a response to a world ravaged by the Black Death, and in Holbein’s art, Death is a living figure, depicted in each engraving interacting with a different member of society. Death appears as a skeleton, sometimes with a few tattered shreds of skin draped over his rib cage, and often mocking his victims by wearing their clothing. For example, in “The Child,” Death wears a peasant’s cap and drags an innocent toddler out of his home while mother and sibling look on in horror. No one escaped Death’s clutches—Holbein shows everyone from a queen to a ploughman to a robber being taken by his Grim Reaper. Holbein’s interest in the Plague was borne out by his own death, since many scholars believe he succumbed to the disease in 1543.

Holbein may have been known in his time as a painter and for his work as the official artist at the court of Henry VIII, but  …