The Walking Dead Vol. 4: Heart's Desire review

    The Walking Dead is a series I'm greatly fond of but I am forced to take in small doses. I am a great fan of bleakness and uncompromising narrative, but I have to spread out my appreciation of such. That's my excuse for why I haven't reviewed a trade since July of 2014 and I'm sticking to it. Totally not me getting caught up in other things.

    Hehe.

    I liked this volume because it's a follow up to Safety Behind Bars. The book begins when Rick Grimes takes his first step down the road to Hell by murdering a fellow human being in order to keep the prison for the group. Said human being was trying to force them out but "the greater good" is a very flimsy justification for doing so, especially when they'd just accused him of murdering two girls for no real reason.

    Much of this book deals with the fallout from Rick's choice, culminating in the group losing faith in his leadership. Rick doesn't really want to be the sole leader, anyway, but is outraged at the idea he's losing it. Rick needs the reassurance everything he's doing is for the greater good and having the group question that is far more hurtful than the idea he's the leader. Rick wants less to be the leader than to be "right."

    We also get the arrivel of series staple Michonne. Said character arrives with her pair of chained up zombies, a katana, and almost no past. Michonne is an interesting character because she seems to come from a different genre than the otherwise realistic survivors. Several months in and Michonne has adapted to becoming a superhero-esque zombie-slayer.

    Michonne's presence is both a blessing and a curse for the group. She brings a considerable boon to the group's security but she also seduces Tyreese within hours of her arrival. This disrupts the group's dynamic as Tyreese was in a relationship with Carol. It's not like on the outside where a break-up is a bad thing but people get over it. Everyone's hope for the future is hanging by a thread.

    One of the most memorable moments in the entire series, iconic even, ends this volume as it also reveals one of the fundamentals of the comic's "rules" for zombies. I'm not a suicidal man by nature but, I've got to tell you, this revelation would have me contemplating taking a bullet over continuing.

    I think the best part of this volume is the fact it manages to find the sweet spot between gritty depression as well as humanist hope. There's deaths in this book but they're not so overwhelming or bleak we lose hope for the survivors. Instead, it's an almost cerebral meditation on the basic questions of how much our survivors want to give up of the old world in order to survive in the new.

    In conclusion, this is one of my favorite volumes in The Walking Dead. The focus is on the characters and the situations which arise as a result of the apocalypse. It's a rather slow volume but it's entertaining, believable, and full of hints for what is to come. I'm also a fan of the Michonne character as her out-of-genreness works with the fact everyone reacts to her like she's a crazy yet awesome person.

10/10

The Walking Dead vol 3#: Safety Behind Bars

    The Walking Dead's third trade paperback is an interesting change-up in the narrative and something I'm quite glad of. It's also the first of the volumes I have some serious reservations of, in part because I think the story goes some places which are unnecessary. This is the first volume I have started to see some of the fan's complaints that it might be "misery porn." I don't agree with them but I can certainly see why they would come to such a conclusion.

    The premise of Safety Behind Bars is Rick Grimes and his gang have decided they need to create a fortified settlement in order to survive the zombie apocalypse. They need to find a place which has food, space, strong walls, and hopefully a defensible position. In the end, they decide the best place is a nearby prison they stumble onto.

    The arc consists of dealing with the slow but inevitable realization the biggest problem facing them may not be zombies anymore, but their fellow humans. This is a common enough story arc in zombie tales but particularly poignant here because we've let our guard down. Like the characters, we think the prison will be safe.

    We're wrong.

    The addition of a new group of survivors broadens the cast a bit and gives a new dynamic to the group. The prisoners who survived in the prison until this time seem to be a fairly harmless group. While Lori is suspicious of them, Rick Grimes is willing to accept the prisoners as fellow human beings. Whether this turns out to be a mistake or not is the focus of both this and the next volume.

    I liked that Robert Kirkman decided to bring Herschel, Glenn, Maggie, and the rest of the farm characters to the prison. I was quite fond of them all and watching them adjust to life in the prison as well as cope with the fallout from Miles Behind Us was a great thing. Herschel's new-found pacifism is something that's simultaneously admirable as well as stupid in an environment where only the strongest survive.

    My earlier mention of misery porn has to deal with a horrific event which occur midway through the books to characters I never expected would suffer such a nightmarish fate. Given what's already happened to a certain character related to them, this just seemed gratuitous. Of course, I read The Walking Dead because it doesn't pull any punches. This is a just a warning, the books only get darker from here.

    Oddly, my favorite moment in the book is an equally bleak moment. A suicide-compact which has been alluded to in previous volumes and comes to its conclusion here. Why I liked this one and disliked the other can be chalked up to a number of reasons, mostly spoilerific but boil down to my feeling this was a better example of characterization as well as plotting. The affects it has a on surviving character are both enthralling as well as heartbreaking. I also applaud a "fake out" with a character's death that had me cheering when it was revealed he was alive.

    In conclusion, The Walking Dead continues to be a gripping and violent story about people pushed to the brink of survival. If you like dark comics, and why would you be reading it otherwise, you'll continue to like this series. Still, I can't help if I think this one was a little exploitative.

8/10

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The Walking Dead vol. 2#: Miles Behind Us review

    The Walking Dead vol. 1# (reviewed here) ended with the survivors on the road as winter fell in Atlanta. With their first losses from both zombie attacks and internal struggles, the survivors need some place they can hold up in order to survive. But in a world overrun by the Living Dead, is any place safe?

    I'm fond of Miles Behind Us because it deals with as much the issues of day-to-day survival as it does the zombie menace. While the Walkers are certainly a threat, a bigger problem is the fact food can no longer be bought from grocery stores and things like heat during the wintertime are now issues of vital importance.

    We also get some answers to obvious questions which emerge in the zombie apocalypse like--why not find a well-fortified location and hold up there. The answer in this is "what qualifies as well-fortified?" Seemingly secure locations can turn out to be in severe danger of being overrun by the Walkers and their surprising ability to hide in the most innocuous locations can get people killed.

    The majority of Miles Behind Us deals with the interaction between the Survivors and the family of Hershel Greene. A kindly veterinarian and farmer, Hershel is ill-equipped for the apocalypse in sense but well-equipped in position. His farm is well-defended against the Walkers due to its fence and the ample food supplies growing around him. The Survivors want to settle there but their (sensible) practice of killing Walkers offends Hershel.

    Hershel wants desperately to believe there's some trace of the original humans inside the Walkers and that things aren't nearly as bad as they've become. His patriarchal control over his extended family threatens everyone, both Atlanta camp survivor and Greene, due to how terribly wrong he is about the Walkers' menace.

    It's interesting to have the primary enemy here be compassion and hope as opposed to something more malevolent. It is becoming a running theme in the comics that a balance has to be struck between pure ruthlessness and a person's higher ideals. Being a good person will not save you in the zombie apocalypse and may destroy you. Being a bad person won't protect you any better.

    It seems Team Neutral is going to win the day for once.

    A running theme of this volume is also how people cope with grief. Hershel's belief in the humanity of Walkers is motivated in large part by his denial over the deaths of so many loved ones. Other characters who have lost close loved ones find themselves unable to function and resent the implication they need to "get over it." In real life, a lot of people don't get over grief and it destroys them. Others have it change them, turning once-benevolent and good people into angry individuals looking for someone to strike at.

    Such is the case in The Walking Dead.

    Life.is.not.fair.

    Surprisingly, this volume contains quite a bit of sex. Characters attempt to find something to distract themselves from the destruction around them. Some of them find love (or at least think they do) while others just sink further into oblivion. I found this to be quite a human reaction and am pleased Kirkland addressed it so early. I'm also fond of the newly introduced character of Tyreese, who is every bit as capable as Rick in surviving.

    The books art remains consistently good and the sight of Atlanta in winter contrasted against the rural paradise of the Greene farm. I am amazed at the artists' ability to capture so many expressions and convey the emotions of our suffering protagonists. The black and white art also manages to make the images more emotional as colorized zombie attacks would probably distract a person from the event's meaning to focus on the gore. At least, IMHO.

    So far, still one of the best comics I'm reading.

10/10

The Walking Dead Vol. 1#: Days Gone By review

    I'm a big fan of The Walking Dead television series. However, as with any adaptation, there's going to be lots of changes from one medium to the next. I suspect this comic would have been as shocking as the television show (if not more so) if I'd come into it unspoiled. As such, I'm still very impressed with the work done by the writer. The art, too, despite being in black and white.

    Before I get into anything, I'm going to say upfront this is one of the definitive works of zombie fiction and anyone who is fond of the genre should consider getting the trades or the compendiums as a "must have." While fans of the television show will get almost everything the comics bring, they're different enough that I still recommend this as a prospective purchase.

    The premise of The Walking Dead's first volume is pretty simple. Kentucky Sheriff's Deputy, Rick Grimes, is critically injured during a shoot-out with prison escapees. Going into a coma, he wakes up days after the zombie apocalypse. It's a lovely Day of the Triffids homage and works well here as it does in so many other stories like Resident Evil: Apocalypse or 28 Days Later.

    The heart of this volume is Rick's search for his family and how he deals with them once he finds them. It's a very elemental story, working on a lot of primal archetypes. A man attempting to protect his family during war and/or natural disaster is one of the most relatable stories in fiction. It's not the most progressive of tales but we see how author Robert Kirkman lays seeds for the story to progress in unexpected ways along this front too.

    The characters of The Walking Dead are lovingly realized in the short time we get to know them. Glenn the pizza-delivery boy, Andrea the lawyer, Lori the housewife, Dale the cantankerous old man, Shane the jealous alpha male, and others. Quite a few of these characters, I won't say which, will end up as zombie chow over the course of the story but the fact Robert Kirkman is willing to kill his darlings is a major appeal of the comic.

    There's too often very little sense of real danger for horror story protagonists and this series blows that idea out of the water. You like the heroes of the Walking Dead and want them to survive. When they don't, you mourn them. When they do, you cheer them on.

    Which is how you do it in horror.

    While the majority of story was familiar to me as a fan of the TV series, I still enjoyed reading it and am glad to have purchased it. The introduction by Robert Kirkman where he explains the "essence" of the zombie's appeal, was almost worth the price of the volume ($10) alone. He says, as should be obvious but isn't, the zombies are never the stars of good zombie fiction--the survivors are.

    I think what I liked best about The Walking Dead volume 1# is all the human elements. Robert Kirkman takes time to have the characters chat about their previous lives, have arguments over teaching children to carry firearms, and share their fears for lost loved ones as well as what they'll do when everything gets better. These are the most moving moments of the book for me.

    I will say that I wasn't 100% sold on all the decisions in the story. The character of Lori is hard to like with the majority of her dialogue being about nagging Rick, how she couldn't finish college, how she's fine doing so-called "woman's work", and how it's a bad thing to teach 7-year-old Carl how to shoot. The death of a very interesting character at the end of the volume also feels like a wasted opportunity. These are minor complaints in the grand scheme of things, though.

    As mentioned, the art is in black and white but Tony Moore's work is quite striking. He manages to make each character distinct and believable. His expression was great and add much of the humanity the book needs to survive. Really, the monochromatic color scheme makes the comic feel more stark in a way. I don't think the comic would be nearly as entertaining without his great work here.

    In conclusion, great stuff. Not much more to say than that.

9/10

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