by
Robert Kirkman and Tony Moore
144
pages, Image Comics
Review
by Pat Black
I’ve
written the title and the authors and the number of pages and the publisher and
finally my own name, but here’s a question: Why bother reviewing The Walking Dead? I can’t add anything. Should
I review breathing next? Should I review existence?
You
probably know lots about this graphic novel or its TV adaptation without having
actually seen or read it, like me. It’s the story of American everyman copper
Rick Grimes, who emerges from a coma in hospital after getting shot tackling a
bank robber, only to find the world has ended while he was sleeping. He gets
out of bed, puts his clothes on, and tries to find his family, encountering
difficulties along the way.
Specifically:
zombies. The groaning, shuffling, rotting undead, hungry for living flesh. Rick
has to look lively. He escapes the video-game-level nightmare in the hospital –
just - and then hits the road.
He
eventually journeys to an Atlanta teeming with zombies. After a narrow escape
or two, he hooks up with a community which includes his missing wife and son,
and led by his fellow copper and best mate, Shane. Living in the woods just
outside the city in their cars and camper vans, the community tries to survive
as the zombies close in around them. Not everyone makes it, but you already
knew that…
The Walking Dead seems
to have been going on so long that it’s practically dead on its feet – series
after series, shock after shock, more soap opera than horror story. The media
gets everywhere now, so you can hardly have missed it, or references to it. You’ll
probably know about people like Negan from only the briefest skim of online
entertainment news. Ditto the shocking deaths, the gore, and the fact that Egg
from This Life has been turned so
convincingly into an American policeman. Hey, remember when you had to actually
watch shows to know things like that? You had to sit down with This Life in order to know who Egg was,
back in the day. You don’t need to have watched or read The Walking Dead to know who Rick Grimes is. I’m the proof.
But
this is a general whinge, and nothing to do with Robert Kirkman’s work.
I’ve
read it now, or at least the first part of a sprawling comic book epic,
comprising six issues. As a story it’s hard to fault – exciting, scary, sad,
poignant, and gory. As you’ll have spotted it’s not original, though. Man in a
coma waking up to find the world changed? We’ve already seen that in a
zombie(ish) story, 28 Days Later.
Before that, we saw it in Day of the
Triffids. And the zombies abide by the modern rules of the genre. But this
is to be expected; few fictional constructs are more rigidly defined than
zombie lore. Rules get bent or broken in werewolf stories or vampire stories,
but sometimes you’ll get a vampire who walks during the day or a werewolf who
changes without recourse to lunar cycles, and snorts at the idea of silver
bullets in that way only old dogs can. You get little deviation with zombies,
though. The late George A Romero didn’t invent the idea of zombies, either, but
he surely perfected it, so much so that people rarely mess with the furniture half
a century on from Night of the Living
Dead. So, The Walking Dead’s Zombies
eat human flesh; they can die – for good - via a bullet to the head, or just a
general interruption in their brain tissue. They transmit the virus by biting
you, after which you die, then un-die. And just as in Romero’s work, the
surviving humans, with all their faults, prejudices, lusts and jealousies, must
band together to survive as the undead close in. The Walking Dead has plenty of those bits.
Speaking
of bits (the kind that drop off), there’s one gruesome novelty in this story
that I liked: artist Tony Moore’s walking dead rot properly. I‘ve often wondered
– and hopefully It’s Not Just Me – what would happen with zombies regarding
insect infestation, if the undead were to exist in real life. Surely beasties
and larvae would help the natural processes along, and you wouldn’t get too
much trouble from a disarticulated skeleton. In the warm months, there’d be a
zombie mass die-out (or die-die-out) as mother nature gets busy on that
smorgasbord of decomposing meat. But you rarely see this in zombie films, even
though it’d be a really horrific effect to perfect on screen, and a perfectly
achievable one with state-of-the art make-up and computer graphics.
Max
Brooks, in his Zombie Survival Guide
and World War Z, explained that the
zombie virus repels insects and slows down the work of bacteria, which I
believe was the first time anyone’s actually tried to solve the paradox of
rotting zombies which don’t rot properly.
But
I’m happy to say The Walking Dead
goes the other way; you’ll see the monsters’ skin seething with vermin here.
“Give us a kiss!” you would say, before puckering up. In fact, few details are
spared in this book, whether that’s in showing you decomposition, spurting
blood or the effects of a bullet to the head.
There’s
a statement about gun use and gun ownership when one character saves another who
hadn’t wanted him to have weapons by killing a zombie with a headshot. The Walking Dead saga comprises 176
issues and counting at time of writing, so this outcome may well be rendered
ironic thanks to subsequent episodes. And without guns you’d have a lot less
drama in zombie stories, I get that… Just, God spare us a world where owning a
firearm is a necessity.
Another
great strength to this story is its sense of action underpinned by solid drama
and believable characters. Little wonder it translated so well to a
long-running TV show, flesh-eaters and flying brains aside. First you’ve got
Rick trying to find his family. Then, once he finds them, it turns out they’ve
been looked after by his mate, Shane. And not only looked after, in his wife
Lori’s case… Always, the test isn’t just family loyalty – it’s got a lot to do
with the moral choices Rick Grimes makes, and how much he can hold onto his
essential decency while the world goes to hell around him.
What
really inspired me to put the words down here was the most frightening thing about
this frightening book: the blurb on the back. It goes something like: “When was
the last time you really had to do something for yourself? When was the last
time you had to find and prepare your own food? When was the last time you had
to fight to stay alive?”
These
are troubling questions. I can see myself reporting for duties after the army
shows up to save us during the undead apocalypse. “What can you do, son?” the
guy at the desk would ask. “You got any skills? You build things? You put up
houses? You fix fences? You do any farming? Animal husbandry? Hmm. Can you fire
a gun? Do you have a gun? Handle guns at all? Even once? No? Have you got any skills we could use? Typing, you
say. Well. Think you can adapt to using a shovel? Get shovelling, then. You’re
on latrines duty.”
What
real skills do you have? It’s a sobering question. And with the passage of
time, lack of skill isn’t merely restricted to mechanical matters and nuts n’
bolts practicalities, or even survivalist fantasies. Think about coding,
computers, and the digital world. This is everywhere, but how much do you
really know about computing? Here we find a new frontier of technical
knowledge, and I freely admit I know nothing about it beyond zeroes-and-ones.
Most of us would have to phone someone if something goes wrong (and hopefully
not with our phones). Or – admit it – we’d simply buy more hardware to replace
whatever conked out.
Here
is my sum knowledge about coding:
10
Print “bugger all”
20
Goto 10
Run
Who
knows when the breakdown will come? Not to go all Chicken Little on everyone,
but cities, city states, empires and whole societies fail. It’s happened
before, it’ll happen again. There may come an age when London is ruins, or
underwater, or a desert. The ancient Babylonians thought they were the bees’
knees, too, but they’re a long time out of the game. The curtain might come down
sooner than we think. As I said, it’s a sobering thought.
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