THE WALKING DEAD

My next piece was going to round off a comic book trilogy by taking a look at GOTHAM CENTRAL. It’s a series that was heavily influenced by the first two comics I looked at, and would have shown their legacy.

Best laid plans of Jokers and men…

I haven’t re-read enough of the series yet to really do it justice. In the meantime, I did get addicted to THE WALKING DEAD.
Does it really fit with the themes of this site? Well, I’m sure I could make arguments that proved it did, if I worked at it. But lets not derail the show. I’m not going to limit my writing by making an argument that everything is noir; sometimes I’m just going to go with it.



THE WALKING DEAD is something of a phenomenon. A creator owned ‘indie’ comic. Its possibly the only comic on the market that’s figures are constantly going up. That doesn’t happen, it just doesn’t.

To any fans of horror films, its premise is simple and cliché. Zombies are walking the earth. Nobody knows why. Civilization has fallen. The cities are overrun; the government is nowhere to be seen.

The series, now on issue fifty-something, starts when Rick, an injured cop, wakes from a coma in hospital to find the world has collapsed while he was asleep. Yes, the beginning has been done before, but that’s not the point. If this series uses some well-trodden clichés, it’s using them in a new way. The films have always been limited by their time. Even the most ambitious of films, and Romero got pretty ambitious, could only provide character study for a couple of hours. What THE WALKING DEAD can do, that’s not been done before, is to tae these clichés and run with them. And then keep running. We’ve followed the cast of characters far beyond the point where any film would have left them behind. Some characters last a couple of issues, some last for over forty.

We get to see people try and cope with the madness; we get to see religious people either lose faith or see the apocalypse as proof that the bible was right. We get to see the limits of our own rules, the point as which it becomes acceptable to start killing people who disagree with you. The lengths people will go to defend their families when there is no law around to come and help.

And there are the cliffhangers. Oh god, the cliffhangers.

The first couple of issues are quite tame. They set up the world and introduce you to Rick. Nothing much really happens and the cliff-hangers don’t really have much impact. Once the rest of the cast begin to get introduced, everything goes to hell. Almost every one of the first 49 issues ends in some moments that makes you swear, or gasp, or cry. Serious shit happens, and nobody in the cast is safe.

Issue 49 put tears in my eyes, and that feels rare these days.

So go for it, run out and get the trades to catch up, then start buying the issues. THE WALKING DEAD is proof that comic books as a 22 page monthly art form are not dead. Proof that, if the industry could be bothered fixing distribution, they would still be able to sell comics instead of abandoning them for trade paperbacks.