Some Things Are Better Left Undead

Tuesday, May 20, 2008 | 3:21 PM

From five to about fifteen years of age - the glory years of childhood and adolescence - I was an avid comic book reader. I thrilled to the exploits of Marvel comics superheroes and Jack Kirby inspired monsters, and breathlessly hurried to the comic book stand at 86th and Broadway with my fistful of change, hoping for the latest issues. In the 60's and 70's, comic book heroes were noble, almost perfect role models for kids, save the occasional self absorption of Spiderman or the suggested alcoholism of Iron Man. There was a cartoonish level of violence, no bad language and the barest hint of the erotic, usually limited to the costumes clinging snugly to the absurdly perfect bodies of the female heroines, like Sue Richards of the Fantastic Four and Wonder Woman.

Well, it's 2008, and some comics (sorry, graphic novels - comics is now too infantile a name) are very, very different. Characters curse, have sex, kill for both moral and immoral purposes, and generally behave like....well, human beings. Does this make for good reading? Or have comics just descended into the gutter, with their innocence lost forever? Well, in one instance, the anything goes, go-for-broke style of today's graphic novels works brilliantly.

Since the fall of 2003, Robert Kirkman's The Walking Dead has been one of the more powerful books out there. The plot is basic and, yes, familiar: The world has inexplicably been overrun by swarms of flesh eating zombies, and a small band of survivors, led by the heroic Rick Grimes, struggle day to day to survive. Although it borrows heavily from other sources ( like George Romero's zombie movies and John Wyndham's Day of the Triffids), the series manages to achieve something that its inspirations never did: a profound, detailed and believable psychological realism. This is due to both the sheer length of the series (issue number 50 is coming up in a couple of weeks) and the excellent writing/drawing team of Kirkman and Charlie Adlard (Tony Moore did the first 6 issues). Kirkman's use of silence in the series is admirable, letting Adlard's moody black and white drawings tell much of the story without it seeming overly expository, and yet they are equally adept at long, dialogue driven passages as they are with the more frenetic action sequences.

I don't want to give away too much of the book's constantly evolving plot and endless supply of characters
(it drives me crazy when reviewers kill the suspense), but I do want to state unequivocally that the best thing about the Walking Dead is this: no character - not even the cherished lead - is ever safe from harm and even death. People perish with alarming suddenness, and the effect is both gripping ,suspenseful and completely addicting. The Walking Dead, like the creepy flesh eating ghouls that inhabit it, shows no signs of slowing down. Long live the Dead!

By Zach Galligan in Zach Galligan | Link | 0 Comments | Recommended (2)

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