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WARNING:
We spoil everything about the comic
book series so if you've yet to catch up with the horror
comic book, display caution. Plus, the
comic book may reflect storylines from the television
series so, again, display caution.
Back
when "The Walking Dead" began running at local comic
shops across America, I just wasn't a comic book reader.
I'd spent most of my young years being an absolute
hardcore comic book geek and making it my mission to
catch the latest issue of Superman and keep up with the
most recent multi-issue arcs, and for a long time I
swore I wouldn't stop reading comic books. To this day I
still have my crate with my personal collection of
Superman, Avengers, and X-Men comics tucked away
somewhere in plastics with back boards. But somewhere
along the line I pretty much lost my track and moved on
to something else. Frankly I moved on to collecting
movies and they became replacements for comics, but
mostly it was because of the dwindling outlets for
purchasing comics that did me in. Once you could go in
to a pharmacy to buy some comic books, maybe a grocery
store, and often times the news stands were packed to
the brim with amazing comic books being handled by an
Asian or Mexican man who had no idea what the hell Spawn
was, but was more than happy to stock them.
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By the way,
a newsstand was something before the new
millennium that typically sold magazines,
newspapers, porno mags, and comic books
usually located in a city block or in the
middle of a subway. Interesting, no? In
either case, where once you couldn't turn
around without finding a comic book, now you
really had to search far and wide for a
comic book shop to find the comic books you
wanted. These days, like everything else,
you either have to buy them online, or wait
for an electronic version to read on an ipad
or whatever device is out there capable for
reading things on.
In either
case I lost track and just stopped looking
for comic books, especially with storylines
becoming much more muddled and convoluted as
the years went on. But my ultimate
re-emergence in to the medium was horror
comics. And not just horror comics, but damn
good ones, ones I purposely sought out to
read as much as humanly possible. And I was
not disappointed. Comic books like
"Hack/Slash" and "Crimson" really did turn
me on to the concept of comic books again,
while Marvel did a damn good job with
"Marvel Zombies," a gimmick that was
ridiculous but still rather weird to sit
through. |
And
then there was Robert Kirkman's "The Walking Dead." Like
every comic these days the only way I'm informed of
comics is through my online haunts and with my buddy
(and contributor) Brian Pittman who is much of a comic
geek than I am, and helped me fully realize the
brilliance that is "The Walking Dead." Robert Kirkman's
black and white epic series is something of an
underestimated little gem. Kirkman clearly has his head
on straight as a storyteller as he's a man who is not
prone to serving fans what they want or allowing them to
dictate the arcs, but is more about offering up what he
thinks will make storylines much more complicated and
complex. Often times he can send readers in to a bit of
a rage with plot twists and gruesome deaths and often
times he can keep them begging for the next issue to
come to shops so they can see what has happened next.
Kirkman is much like Joss Whedon in the sense that
whether a character is popular or not, he'll do whatever
he wants with them and you can only watch and hope for
the best. Just because a character is a gunslinger who
is a warrior out on the apocalyptic wasteland is deemed
iconic by fans, it doesn't mean Kirkman isn't going to
have them torn to shreds by flesh eaters in the next
issue.
He'll
do what he pleases, and we can only watch and hope for
the best. I still do not forgive Kirkman for cutting off
main protagonist Rick Grimes' hand in the third arc of
"The Walking Dead," and to this day I'm still trying to
decide if this was a brilliant move in the character
development or something of a way to keep us worrying.
Having only one hand in a zombie wasteland ensures a
bonafide handicapped for anyone hoping to wield a gun on
a roamer. I can still fondly recall sitting down to read
the issue and at the very end seeing Rick screaming as
they chopped his hand off in a big splash. And I sat
there frozen thinking "No... that didn't happen." I
re-read the issue and thought again, "No, that can't be.
He didn't cut off Rick's hand, this is a dream sequence
for sure." But lo and behold, Kirkman handicapped our
valiant hero, he took away one lifeline for the man
who'd awoken in a hospital one day to find the world had
transformed in to a veritable buffet for anything not
carrying a pulse.
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grim world as it was Rick's. "The Walking
Dead" is just charming that way in the sense
that all of our security is just washed away
in shocking turns of events and moments that
are just so haunting fans continue to talk
about them. I'm still reeling over the turn
to madness the group experienced when
confronted with the demented cannibals who
made it their mission to hunt the team down
one by one and devour them out of
desperation. I'm still debating with my
friend Brian over whether or not Rick and
his teammates ate the cannibals alive. But
then they did eat an infected Dale before
they were foiled, so it's still up in the
air. "The Walking Dead" has even admitted to
such a theme in one arc where Kirkman and
Image Comics proclaimed that no character in
the book was safe to where we're fed a
picture of the group draped in shadows.
Anyone of them could go at any moment and
Kirkman wanted to let us know that he's
running the show in this twisted little
zombie epic. The origins of "The Walking
Dead" are about as fascinating as any comic
book and in true Image fashion, the series
is creator owned. |
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Kirkman
started out like a lot of the founders of Image, a
struggling artist who sought out to create the next big
comic book series. As explained in the fiftieth
anniversary issue, Kirkman dabbled with many concepts
including setting the series in the sixties a la "Night
of the Living Dead," and even came very close to naming
his series "Night of the Living Dead." For those
unaware, George Romero's zombie classic is without a
copyright, so anyone can use the name, the characters,
or the story to their liking without being sued or taken
to court. And like every desperate artist, Kirkman
considered such an idea until warned that once the name
goes on the comic, anyone can have at his characters.
Kirkman's narrative has often been a Sisyphean one where
he constantly keeps our characters taking three steps
forward and four steps back. No matter how much progress
they make, there's always a chance they'll be dragged
back in to the pits of hell. And this is mainly due to
their humanity and their potential for turning tail or
stabbing one another in the backs, because our flaws are
always our undoing. As we saw in the epic prison arc,
Grimes and his band of survivors are not infallible and
one of the primary reasons their land of fenced in
security topples is because the group just can't stay
quiet for just a little while and work together.
Inevitably there's the introduction of lust, envy,
greed, jealousy, or pent up frustration to destroy and
otherwise amazing sanctuary.
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The
introduction of Michonne, the sword wielding
woman originally shown with two zombies
tethered on her sides as a way of keeping
the dead away from her smell and presence
not only makes for an interesting sequence,
but once she meets the people of the prison,
we just know she's going to be trouble.
Disturbed, and dependent on her sword, she
takes it upon herself to slide in to the
group and engage in a sexual affair with
group co-leader Tyreese which spawns a
massive fight and suicide from one of
Tyreese's girlfriends. For Rick Grimes being
shot in the middle of a robbery one fateful
day in front of his friend Shane was
probably the worst thing that ever happened
to him. He almost died, he awoke to a zombie
apocalypse, and he lost his family.
Or perhaps it
was the best thing that happened to him.
Rick's entire existence since the first
issue has relied solely on making it out of
tight situations by the skin of his teeth
and barely making it out alive more times
than not. He's come face to face with death
and undeath more times than any hardcore fan
can truly count, and it's never a clear
indicator if Rick would have survived to see
the end of the world or be at the very same
place he was before. |
Rick's
coma that brings him to the forefront of the zombie
apocalypse gives him a totally new outlook on life, this
is a man whose entire morals and ideals were set in the
world of law and order and civilization where he kept
law in a world of crime, and he has to adjust those
morals and ideals to a new world and a whole new society
where the sky he looks out on sets down on somewhere
completely different. It's a world where law and order
have been abandoned, crime is now a way of life, and the
people Rick thought he knew before he died really aren't
the people they once were. Unlike him, they've
experienced the break out of the zombie apocalypse, they
know the rituals of exterminating the dead, they know
the mercilessness of the human soul when applied to
survival. Rick was lucky enough to be in a coma the
entire time and has no idea what his family has had to
do to live, so when he awakens, he gains a bonafide
crash course in zombie survival and it drives him mad. |
