The Walking Dead: Robert Kirkman

Zombies, Zombies, Zombies! Rotting human corpses returned to life with an avaricious hunger to consume the flesh of the living. In the good spirit of Halloween, I thought I would take this time to share with you a comic book that I eagerly anticipate each month. No, wait, let me rephrase that: The Walking Dead is an excellent piece of graphic (and I mean that ambiguously) literature that always leaves me needing more. What writer Robert Kirkman and Artists Charlie Adlard and Cliff Rathburn have created is an ernest and probable tale of would almost certainly happen if the dead actually returned to life to devour our brains.

The story began 66 issues ago (2003) with a a small town cop who finds himself in a shoot out with a deranged hillbilly shouting “I wont go back!” When the cop, Rick Grimes, wakes up from the attack, he is alone an abandoned hospital – abandoned until some crazy zombies start reaching their grubby, rotting hands for a juicy live brain! I won’t give anything vital away because I am a firm believer that The Walking Dead must be read from the beginning, but what I can tell you is that Rick is thrust into a world where all laws of civil order has dissolved society to a ugly, primitive beast.

Over the course of the series the characters are forced to make integral and onerous decisions in order to ensure the survival of the group, and as the plot progresses characters come and go, but each one has their own unique persona and way of dealing with tragedy, contributing to the larger story of the bonds made through human survival and dependence.

What is so compelling about this book is that, yes, there is gratuitous gore, but is the complex weave of shattered characters that really drives the story. As a side note, the comic is in black and white so the violence is not over the top as would be expected from a Sam Raimi movie. But I ensure you that the black and white style does not detract in any from the art or the book in any way; if anything it only adds to the dark and ominous tone of it.

This book single-handedly reignited my love of comic books, so if you have any interest in comic books, or you liked Dawn of the Dead, then I recommend picking up this title.