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.
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.
This was our 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.
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.
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.
This leads to the wonderful introduction of Glenn, one of the most humble and sympathetic heroes in pop culture in the last ten years who is a master survivalist after only a short time in a world infested by the walking dead becoming a saving grace for Rick who is at first ridiculously outnumbered and soon finds a savior in him. Glenn is a very low key character. He’s one who was once a food delivery man who hasn’t lose his strive to run as fast as possible and survive in horrible conditions. Free of stereotypes or clichés, Glenn’s nationality is rarely called in to attention, because Kirkman brings his humanity to the forefront in the first issues. This is a man who has turned leaping the rooftops of the city in to an art form for scavenging and hunting supplies, and in the midst of his travels fate happens to bring Rick Grimes to his feet. Glenn is a well under-estimated individual, and one who has managed to outlive every single person in his group by the skin of his teeth.
Since then we’ve seen him blossom in to a hero, a empathic sidekick, a weapons engineer and we even watched him struggle to hold on to his sanity and identity when tortured and held captive by the Governor and his brutal army in the Woodsbury town. Glenn hasn’t had much confidence to speak of which has thrown him in to the arms of his girlfriend Maggie, but this has also given him clarity and a clear definition of purpose when he found a lover, and eventually became a father-like individual to orphaned children from past survivors who fell under the tooth and nail of the undead and vicious nomads lurking within the wilderness of the wasteland. Glenn is probably one of my top five characters.
When we first question the morals of Rick and his group, it’s when the inevitable conflict arises between his best friend Shane and his wife Lori. While Rick was thought dead, Lori slept with Shane and is pregnant and now Rick has suddenly come back from hell and drives a wedge between the three of them that creates not only a love triangle but a palpable tension that turns brutally violent and utterly murderous especially when applied to the often insecure and jealous Shane who is a self-appointed leader in the first arc, but is then shown to be nothing more than a second man striving for the same respect and love Rick instantly garners when he happens in to the camp where he meets other survivors like Dale and Andrea. These people would soon become the allies in Rick’s fight for survival and from the outset we think we know where they’re headed. But Kirkman inevitably proves us wrong by killing anyone he feels needs to be killed.
Sometimes we can sense who is about to exit the series, and sometimes we can never really be sure. We never saw the attack on Andrea, we never really knew who among the prisoners in the second arc was a child murderer, and we never really expected to see Rick push some of the prisoners in to the dead looming outside all the while feeding the killer the roamers outside the gates. While some have criticized the prison arc as being too dramatic for the sake of a horror comic, it’s probably the most beloved among the fans of the comic series mainly because we were given a memorable and haunting enemy beyond the flesh eating undead, and they were called “Woodsbury.”
Although “The Walking Dead” continues to be a beloved and critically acclaimed comic book series with a hardcore fan base, to this day Kirkman has had a very tough time topping the arc involving the prison, the discovery of the war town Woodsbury and their ever vicious grasp on Rick and his group within the prison at the behest of their wratfhful leader the Governor, a twisted monstrous man who is at first charming but soon reveals himself to be a grotesque individual riding on the fear and paranoia of the town and their lust for blood and carnage in a world already filled with it. The governor proves to be a spineless worm but one that has to be feared from the get go, especially when he strategically pinpoints Rick and his crew and traps Glenn, Michonne, and Rick within the confines of the town and really manages to damage each and every one of them in an attempt to learn where the rest of the survivors are holding up and what supplies he can grab from them.
Kirkman’s characterization of every individual in this series is precise and gradual and no two characters are ever alike. On the flipside he allows them all their own personalities and flaw to the point where they’re essentially about as human as a one dimensional black and white page can allow them to be. The fact that the comic has no color gives the stories a chance to pop out from the confines of sleek splashes and computer generated blood splashes, thus the real focus is on the humanity and the characters. And we’re never in short supply of engrossing characters no matter how grotesque or annoying they may be. Rick is a humble hero thrust in to a world of chaos who becomes a morally grayed leader who slowly is broken down in to a shriveling maniac. Andrea is a bubble headed survivor co-dependent on her sister who grows after she is killed by a zombie, and finds her legs as a warrior woman in a world where it’s killed or be killed. She happens to be my favorite character primarily for her willingness to do whatever it takes to survive and possessing a keen eye as a marksman, and Kirkman develops her in to someone we can truly root for as the third arc rolls around.
Folks like Tyreese, and Glenn, and Maggie, and Lori are all folks given their day in the spotlight among the walking dead, and Kirkman breaks down the social under current and racial unrest among these folks, all of whom have their own demons and scars. The pious Hershel begins as a problem for the group, a farm owner who holds a strict hand over his children and has a bad habit of keeping groups of the walking dead in his barn convinced they can be turned. This leaves the door open for an enraged discussion about the walking dead and their own stance in life. Are they just infected who can be reversed if given enough time or are they beyond the grasp of mortal help and modern medicine and have to be snuffed like locusts? But as with the usual Kirkman trademark, Hershel ends up becoming much more than a religious fanatic with a strong grip on his family. He is in the end an organized and quiet individual who manages to keep order in the prison walls and try desperately to restore his family in the war zone until the very end when being mercifully taken down by raiders from Woodsbury.
And one of the most underrated characters of the entire mythos was undeniably Axel, the humongous bearded giant the group originally met while hiding out in the prison who gradually morphed from a shifty desperate loner to a bonafide gentle giant who proved a good asset for the team until the Governor raided the prison ending his life in the middle of combat. The arc that comes dangerously close to topping the prison arc is “Fear the Hunters” a desperate fight for survival against cloaked shadowed beings in the woods who made a game out of hunting down and picking off the survivors and engaging in a horrific series of cannibalistic murders that not only signaled the breaking point for other survivors in this zombie apocalypse, but in Rick and his friends all of whom were driven to doing absolutely unspeakable things to ensure their own survival in the face of these cold and calculating monsters. We’re never really let in on their acts of revenge, but surely enough there remains the sneaking suspicion that Rick and his group consumed the very men who consumed their own.
Kirkman never really explained in detail how they dealt with the hunters, but after their explanation of how they lived and what they did to their children in acts of hunger and desperation, it’s not a far stretch to believe they mutilated and consumed hunters in some form as a way of inflicting their form of reparations. Kirkman is not a man who shies away from the taboo and the disgusting when it applies to advancing his story as much as possible testing the limits of these characters. Who can forget Lori and Rick’s baby being annihilated in the gunfire of the prison siege? Who can forget Tyreese being decapitated in front of the survivors by the governor? And who can forget the Governor tongue kissing his zombified toddler daughter he kept chained in his apartment in the town? This arc led to the current one involving the safe haven, but so far Kirkman has proven he is not without his surprises, even in the face of a rapidly growing fan base who loves to see what he has in store for us.
The television series promises to follow the same suit, paving its own way in the mythos of Kirkman’s epic zombie apocalypse tale that has flourished in a world currently obsessed with death and societal unrest. Kirkman has found his place in the obsessions and has guaranteed top notch literature and fiction through the pages of “The Walking Dead,” a series and fixture of horror that promises surprise after surprise and intelligent storytelling in the middle of gore and grue. It’s a masterpiece of modern art, and we will continue well in to its final run should Kirkman decide to leave the title for bigger aspirations.