"How
many hours are in a day when you don't
spend half of them watching television?
When is the last time any of us really
worked to get something that we wanted?
The world we knew is gone. The world of
commerce and frivolous necessity has
been replaced by a world of survival and
responsibility. An epidemic of
apocalyptic proportions has swept the
globe causing the dead to rise and feed
on the living. In a matter of months
society has crumbled, no government, no
grocery stores, no mail delivery, no
cable TV. In a world ruled by the dead,
we are forced to finally start
living."
Recovering
from a near fatal gunshot wound, Officer
Rick Grimes wakes up from a coma in an
empty hospital room. In fact, all of
Harrison County Memorial appears to be
deserted -- or abandoned. Well, maybe not quite
abandoned. All the dazed and weak Grimes
can find -- wherever he turns are masses
of the undead. E'yup, at some point while
he was out of it, the dead have risen and
begun feasting on the living:
Zombieapocalypse. (Don't
you hate it when that happens? Reason #435
of why I hate hospitals.)
Unsure
of what's going on, the desperate and
confused Grimes manages to fight his way
out of the hospital and makes a bee-line
for his home, where hopefully, his wife
and son are waiting for him. They aren't.
The whole town is just as abandoned as the
hospital -- except for all the zombies
shuffling around trying to eat him.
Combine all that with the horrors he's
witnessed since waking up, Grimes starts
to unravel -- until he's gonged over the
head with a shovel.
Grimes
wakes up to an apology from Morgan Jones.
His young son, Duane, thought Grimes was
one of those things. Jones goes on
to explain what happened (but not
how or why) and basically
within a span of several weeks
civilization as we knew it has collapsed.
He also says that when the crisis began,
the government urged citizens to head to
any major city to be better protected from
the outbreak. (So FEMA would be in
charge during a zombie invasion? Man, no
wonder we're always screwed in these
things.) This perks Grimes up. His
in-laws live in Atlanta, so he figures
Lori, his wife, took their son Carl there
and makes plans to go and find them.
You
get the sense that Jones doesn't have the
heart to tell him what a monumentally bad
idea that is -- all the major cities have
been overrun and saturated with the not-quite-dead.
So he remains silent and declines to go
with him. After a quick raid of the
precincts arsenal, and several pointers on
how to take a zombie out, Grimes
commandeers a cruiser and heads toward
Atlanta, holding onto the one thing that's
keeping him sane -- seeing Lori and Carl
again.
*
* * *
Author
Robert Kirkman swears his main goal in The
Walking Dead
is not to scare people, and at that he
succeeds. Now don't get me wrong, there's
plenty of creepy and ghoulish things to be
found in these panels but at it's heart,
these books are more Soap Opera than
horror movie. And don't let that scare you
off, either. Panel after panel of
nothing but zombie carnage may sound like
a great idea, but would probably grow
tedious by issue #7 or 8. It's the human
element, not the zombie element that makes
this thing work. They're here, they're
dead (and trying to eat you),
get used to it; that is the crux of his
narrative.
So
Kirkman focuses instead on Grimes and his
efforts to keep a rag tag collection of
survivors alive and safe. Our protagonist
finds Atlanta in ruins and falls into a
deathtrap, only to be saved by Glenn -- a
former pizza delivery boy, who sneaks into
the city for provisions. He leads Grimes
back to a refugee camp, consisting of
about a dozen or so survivors, including
-- miraculously, Lori and Carl. They were
shepherded there by Shane, Rick's friend
and fellow deputy. The reunion is a happy
occasion -- except for Shane, who has a
thing for Lori that seemed to be bearing
much fruit with Rick presumed dead.
Things
heat up after several raids into Atlanta
for provisions and firearms. Shane -- the
de-facto leader, thinks they need to stay
put, so when the army comes, they'll be easy
to find. Grimes doesn't think help is
coming any time soon and thinks staying in
one spot is a real bad idea; more and more
zombies are stumbling into the camp.
Leadership slowly shifts from Shane to
Grimes, and things come to a head when the
camp is attacked and several of the group
are killed. Shane snaps and blames
everything on Grimes -- things were going
fine until he showed up. They fight, and
Lori comes to Rick's defense. Angered by
this perceived betrayal, Shane flees into
the woods. Grimes goes after him, and
realizes too late that Shane is going to
kill him. But unbeknownst to either man,
young Carl followed them and shoots Shane
before he can shoot his dad. And that
pretty much wraps up Volume I.
Volume
II opens with a flashback revelation that
on the road to Atlanta, Lori and Shane had
a consensual sexual encounter. And to
compound matters even further, Lori is
pregnant; and who the heck knows who the
father is. In a different time that
infidelity might have mattered, but things
are far, far from normal.
Grimes
rallies his troops and they all pile into
a Winnebago to search out some much needed
supplies, and warmer and safer
surroundings, away from the city. (Winter
has come; a blessing as the zombies appear
to freeze solid, and a curse due to the
lack of heat.) And in one truly
disheartening scene among disheartening
scenes someone realizes it's Christmas,
but Grimes tells them to stifle that talk,
not wanting to pile up anymore grief on
the children of their group. On the road
they pick up a few more stragglers and
find a gated community surrounded by a
large stone wall that appears to be
perfect place to bivouac for awhile. They
clear out a house and find plenty of food,
and hope to find more of the same in the
other houses the next morning. It seems
like a good plan, almost too good to be
true. And we all know what happens in
zombie movies when things start to go
good.
Right.
The
stone walls weren't keeping the zombies
out, they were keeping the zombies in. And
things quickly go in the crapper. They
escape, barely, but not without a few
casualties. Running out of food, gas and
hope, the group finds another improbable
oasis with a fenced in farm. Hershel, the
owner, lives there with his six kids and a
couple of neighbors. And it's his medical
skills as a veterinarian that saves Carl
from a gunshot suffered during a hunting
accident. He welcomes them to stay until
Carl recovers. Things settle down for a
while until a lone zombie wanders by.
Grimes moves to put it down, which causes
Hershel to go ballistic. The farmer can't
believe that these people have been
"killing" the zombies. He sees
them as infected patients that can be
cured, and has been keeping all he's come
across locked up in the barn. And I think
we all know how this is going to turn out,
right?
Right.
Who
dies and who lives to show up in Volume
III I'll leave up to you to find out.
Like
I said before, The
Walking Dead
is a lot more Days
of Our Lives
than Day
of the Dead;
group dynamics, crisis management,
affairs, betrayal and lots and lots of
screwing punctuated by the occasional
zombie attack. And all I can say is, so
far so good. Kirkman really isn't breaking
any new ground here, convention wise, but
as author Stephen King once purported:
[paraphrasing] It doesn't matter that the
idea is cliché, but what your story does
with that cliché. And Kirkman has
sustained that cliché and my interest to
see what happens next to these people for
over 40-issues. So at least to me, he must
be doing something right.
The
art shows the chaos in stark black and
white and subtle gray tones. Tony Moore's
work in the first collection shows a more
defined line, cleaner details and
characters, while Adlard's work is more
blunt and to the point. Both artists can
handle the shambling hordes and deliver
the grue, so either style works for the
subject matter, and my only complaint is
with Adlard because we're dealing with
almost twenty characters and sometimes
it's hard to tell who the heck is who.
One
thing that always bugged me about this
genre, from the very beginning, was the
anatomy of the living dead. In Kirkman's
story, it appears to be an infection and
you don't need to be bitten to become a
zombie. All you have to do is die (a
bite just seems to speed up the process.)
Somehow the brain reactivates, and I
assume some kind of electrical impulses
from this organ keeps the body going, and
the brain is the key. There are several
instances where a zombie's head is lopped
off, rendering the body inert, but the
head continues to chatter about, making a
blow to the cranium the critical step in
stopping them. Which in my thinking, would
make a machete and a simple hammer the
most effect zombie fighting tools. Step
one, lop off the head, step two, a whack
to the forehead. Lather, rinse, repeat.
But
is this some airborne virus gone amuck, or
is there a supernatural explanation for
this plague of the undead. I ask this
because -- and I usually don't like to
bring too much science into my
science fiction -- but the question
has to be asked: If these people are
really dead, it'd take about a week (depending
on environmental factors) for
decomposition to reduce the corpse to
bones. Before that, necrosis, bacteria,
maggots and other factors would reduce
these bloating menaces to putrefied soup
within a few days. (Something else
that's never been touched on that I'm
aware of in film or fiction, but my god,
can you imagine what the world smells like
now? And I don't want to think of the
diseases being spread by vermin with all
that rotting flesh lying around.) My
point of all this is, unless this is
supernatural in nature (then we can
throw science and biology out the window)
or the virus somehow mutates the body and
reduces the decaying process greatly (some
decomposition has to be occurring -- I
mean just look at them) the
zombieapocalypse is a lot more survivable
than one might initially think. All it
would take is a matter of holing up and
waiting for nature to take it's course and
have protective protocols for the newly
deceased and we're gold. Easy. Sounds like
the perfect plan, right?
Right.
Wait
a -- aw crap...
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