I haven’t reviewed the Walking Dead series for a while. But the most recent collection, Book Eight, gave me a lot to think about. The idea behind this series is that it’s not supposed to end. It’s supposed to be about what happens after the big zombie apocalypse, after the survivors find a safe haven. That’s what I really love about this series: seeing what happens after the credits roll in the movie and the safe haven turns out not to be so safe. For the last seven books, I’ve gotten to see Robert Kirkman torture his characters by taking away the safe zones, creating human monsters, and making his characters wrestle with their consciences after having to make very, very hard decisions.
In Book Eight, we get to see our protagonist, Rick, finally trying to think about the long term future. A few volumes ago, Rick and his fellow band of survivors found a place to call home for a while. After seeing the changes in Carl, who has been becoming a hard little man over the series, Rick realizes that living day to day is not enough any more. In order to try and give his son at least a little bit of a childhood, Rick forms a committee to start working on fortifications and farming and all the rest. Sure there are zombies running around waiting to take a bite out of them, but you start to see a ray of hope. It just might be possible to make a good life. At least until Kirkman turns the screws again and reveals the next big challenge Rick and the gang are going to face.
As I read this volume and watched the characters lurch back and forth between emotional states, I started to wonder about the interplay between the book series and the TV series. The TV series has been shadowing the books for a while, with a few major rewrites but the book series has been soldiering on ahead. In this latest volume in particular, though, is saw conversations and events that seemed to me like Kirkman was trying to wrench his narrative around to make book Carl more like TV Carl. I could be wrong about this, but I couldn’t shake the thought.