My Wife: And The Meandering Dead

The Walking Dead #93
Art by Charlie Adlard
Written by Robert Kirkman
Published by Image Comics

Hey hey, Party People. What’s going on? I’ll tell you what’s going on with me. I just had a new experience. I read The Walking Dead. Yeah...I don’t think I’ve ever read a single issue of it in these last 3 or 4 years of my comic book reading tenure. I did see some of the TV show, the one shot down in Georgia with all those British people pretending to be American. It kinda lost me after a bit. Not “lost” like I couldn’t keep up. No. It lost me because my mind wandered away, because although they set up a conflict, the story never moved faster than a snails pace. I think I'm remembering that correctly. I remember not being very grossed out by the show, which I thought was strange. It was pretty gruesome stuff, blood and gore all the time...but it was just kind of there on the screen. I felt like the violence on that show was an alarm going off, and then you'd hit the snooze button and the show would go back to sleep for ten minutes. (When I first wrote this paragraph, I actually thought the show wasn't on television anymore, but then I found out that it still is. Am I really that out of touch? I'm going to watch the wolves versus Liam Neeson movie this week. I still watch Justified and Parks and Recreation. Stupid zombie tv show. You make me feel old.)

Anyhow. I wasn’t sure what I was in for here. I was pleasantly surprised to find out the comic was black and white. Normally, I don’t know that I would like that, but for some reason it drew me in. As a matter of fact, the first page drew me right in. It's issue 93, does not start with any kind of recap, has no weird catch-up narration. It just jumps right in with Rick talking to this dude he just met, and the dude is telling him about this large community situation they have going on that he’d like Rick and his friends to be a part of. I don’t know if was somehow by design, and if it was it is GENIUS, but on the first page (!) I was saying to myself “Hmmm....I don’t know. I know I don’t really know anything about this situation, but I think this might be some sort of trap, Rick. You should tread carefully, as I believe this man may not have your best interests at heart.” And right there on the next page? Rick has a physical reaction that lets me know he was having the exact same thought I was having (by "physical reaction", I mean that Rick fakes a handshake and knocks the guy out). I found myself first thinking “see! I was right!” and quickly switching sides to “Wait! Aren’t you being a little hasty and paranoid?” I found that very entertaining. So much melodrama and conflict in just a few pages!

But I think there's a bad side to that as well.

Why? Look: it's good to get me so fully on board this comic's plot from the jump. I didn’t have to read a bit to find my way in. But the bad thing is that turned out be the only real conflict in the entire issue. By page 2, the whole thing is decided: some people are out there, and either this guy is lying about them or he's not. But by page two, Rick's already decided how he's going to handle that situation--he's going to go and be a badass--which means the next 20-some pages are just a bunch of place-setting type scenes--delegation of duties, game plans, declarations of love - and then the last few weird pages where Rick recaps his feelings on what it means to be a person who has to live with zombies all the time. Yes. Reflection on Life with Zombies. On who they’ve become. On how they respond. On maybe it being time to get outside of the walls and see A LARGER WORLD. (Which is...the title of the story.)

Yeah - it was kinda weird for me. It's about five pages of "stuff" dawning on him and him realizing that maybe the guy that he knocked out and has tied up in a chair “back at the ranch” might be honest and offering them the very thing that he just realized they needed. Cue violins. That’s where I suddenly realized that the the whole comic was just, like, this big set-up for the two page spread of the LARGER WORLD, and to introduce this new mini-series THE LARGER WORLD. And that maybe these characters need to get back to living life rather than fighting the dead.  Get beyond the little community they built and back to.....yes, THE LARGER WORLD. (Again: that's the title of the story.)

So, like, this comic went from feeling clever and fun to feeling like I was being spoon fed the writer’s pitch for this new series. It was a quick read, though, and I guess I enjoyed the art. It felt kinda easy on my eyes, in black and white, which I did not expect. But it seems like the comic book series might be similar to the TV show: it starts off with some engaging excitement and then digresses into a slow, meandering story. And then, on the last page, it promises to do something really important...at some later point. Perhaps? I don’t really know. What do you think?

-Nina Stone, 2012

Comments

[be breezy]

Sounds like Gossip Girl.

[Geek Ademia]

Personally, I got tired of The Walking Dead some time ago, because it's basically about a bunch of people whose entire lot in life is to continually fail over and over, in terms of survival, security, and morality. It's just one long, ugly, ongoing defeat. I don't need every story to be happy, but watching characters dredge up the tiniest bits of hope only to have them forever wrenched away over and over is wearying on a cosmic scale.

[Rick]

Does having the same main character 90+ issues later irk anyone with this series? The world presented is supposed to be one where you can die at any time, well as long as you aren't named Rick Grimes.