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| The Walking Dead |
And so I go from seeing worlds built up to watching them fall apart. Last night, I started reading the first collection of episodes in the Walking Dead series. The purpose of this series is not just to tell a kick-ass zombie story, but to tell one that doesn’t end. Kirkman writes in his afterword that the thing he hates most about zombie movies is that they end. He always wanted to see what happens to the survivors after the credits rolled.
The beginning is a little derivative, as it starts pretty much the same way that 28 Days Later does, with the main character waking up in a deserted hospital after waking from a coma. Rick Grimes is a former small-town cop who realizes that his family is missing, and that everyone left in the hospital and the town has turned into a zombie (Romero-style, not Boyle-style*). He find a pair of survivors who tell him that the last they heard, people were supposed to gather in the cities and that his family has probably headed to Atlanta to wait for a cure. When he arrives, as you’d expect if you’ve ever seen a zombie movie or read a zombie novel, that everyone in the city is dead. He meets a scavenger that leads him back to a camp where (surprise!), Rick finds his wife and young son. From that point on, Rick, his family, and the other survivors travel from place to place, trying to find a place to settle down and live in peace.
The art is a very stylish black and white, which I appreciate. There’s zombies about every five pages or so, on average, so if they did it in color the book would be covered in red and gore. It also harkens back to the original Night of the Living Dead.
I’m looking forward to the next books in the series, but I need to wait for the publishers to print more copies because Amazon seems to have run out of copies for the time being.
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* Romero-style zombies: slow-moving zombies, created by unknown causes but allegedly because “there’s no more room in Hell for the dead.” From the Night of the Living Dead series.
Boyle-style zombies: fast, aggressive zombies that were possible created by a virus or something. Still alive, but very hard to put down. From the 28 Days Later series.