The Walking Dead

Okay lets get one thing straight if you didn’t see the first season of The Walking Dead on AMC, man you missed great television.  I for one am eagerly awaiting the upcoming second season this fall.  Now that being said, I’m amazed how few people I know that have seen and love the show, have read the comics.

What’s that you say?  You didn’t know it was a comic?  Get out of here I don’t believe you.  Next?

Yes you there with the Shawn of the Dead t-shirt…I’m sorry could you speak up?  Are they any good?  Are they any good!?!  Are you seriously asking me that?  Somebody shoot him in the face with a shotgun….

**click**

**BOOM**

Awesome.  Now that all the nasty business is out of the way, where was I again?  Oh yeah, The Walking Dead review…

In case you weren’t aware, it all started waaaay back in 2003.  Yeah that’s right the same year Paschal Couchepin became president of Switzerland, the entire Middle East was a giant clusterfuck, SARS decided to rear it’s ugly head in Hanoi, and the finishing touches were put on the Human Genome project, Robert Kirkman and Tony Moore\Charlie Adlard threw down one of the most revolutionary comic efforts under the banner of Image Comics.  Little did the readers know that 7 years later, the series would still be going strong and it actually receive a series on cable television by quality content provider heavyweights AMC.  The Walking Dead soon moved into the realm of such dark productions by Dark Horse and quality of content like Neil Gaiman’s epic Sandman.

Kirkman has done something with a level of writing that few other mediums are able to acquire, let alone most zombie offerings.  He has woven an amazingly engaging tale of suffering, sociological degradation, psychological turmoil, and the intricacies of human interaction.  As is essential in a zombie story, the tale really has little to do with the actual undead themselves.  So little so that the origin of the monsters really isn’t focused on so much as the whirlwind of survival, death, success, and disappointment that assaults the reader page to page.  Krikman manages to tell great stories issue to issue without having to rely on the hordes of undead just outside the gates.

Be warned, no one is safe.  Kirkman has no problem maiming, harming, emotionally breaking, or even killing anyone, and I mean anyone.  Just like it should be.  I can’t speak highly enough of his storytelling within the medium of comics.  Sometimes, as I’ve heard from friends who work in the industry, storytelling in a medium that often constricts you to snap shots and bullet conversations can be difficult.  Kirkman doesn’t shrink from the challenge but rather assaults it from head on with riot gear.  He isn’t afraid to break convention by perhaps shying away from action in light of the tension of a marriage on the rocks, or the illicit relationship between members of a broken society.

I have to give Kirkman credit in that he does an excellent job of crashing through as well as tiptoeing around intense topics.  He manages to present death, dismembering, sex, and violence in ways that are balanced between insinuation and outright description.  He saves the really bad stuff to illicit the correct response from the reader, despite the fact you just saw bodies being piled into a pyre.  I have yet to experience indifference that might develop in reading other works or callousness that might develop from reading about so much death.  He touches on nicely the extremes of a shattered society and the battle not so much with the undead but with madness and the other people the characters are surrounded with.

While I appreciated Moore’s contribution to the first seven issues, I have to say Adlard is no slouch and both artists did a great job developing the gritty textures of the comic with clean lines and not overly complex panels.  Something I’ve found interesting is that in line with most creator owned comics The Walking Dead is in black and white.  And I have to say it adds to the experience.

All in all if you’re not reading this series, you may be missing out on one of the greatest works of this decade, well…last decade.  And if you’re worried about it ruining the show, the comic is almost to issue 90 and the show only managed to cover the first 4-6 issues…

Do yourself a favor and go get this in print or digitally from your favorite comic reading app.  And you can be thrifty either way by buying the collections or TPB’s.