The Walking Dead

“The Walking Dead” always has a fairly nice rhythm of horror, panic, and anxiety followed by quiet, recovery, and re-building. After the most brutal horror over the past few issues since perhaps since the Governor and the subsequent raid on the prison, we’re back into a period of quiet and, as always, it’s a much needed respite. Rick alternately waits by the bedside of his comatose son, tours the community making grand plans for re-building and the future, and re-connects with long time companions Michonne and Andrea, who are engaging in their own versions of recovery and re-building. Though “The Walking Dead” is the comic that years ago single-handedly brought me back to reading monthly comics, Robert Kirkman has not always been able to deliver for me. But that is the downside to being a largely great book; it’s hard to always be great. “The Walking Dead” does it with surprising consistency, and issue #86 on its own is a solid well-executed comic book about characters that readers

Spoiler alert! “The Walking Dead” was a must read last issue. This issue is decidedly less of a “must read,” but it’s still a fine comic, as usual. In the last issue, Rick Grimes’ young son Carl was shot in the face during a battle that left the right side of his head entirely missing, including his right eye. This issue is mostly a battle as our heroes try to maintain control of their walled city, defeating dozens if not hundreds of zombies that have made it inside. Carl is tended to mostly off panel, and at the end of the issue, Rick is talking with renewed hope to his son, bandaged up, and alive but with his fate still unclear. And therein lies my issue with this comic. Carl’s injury rendered as it was in issue #83, does not seem like a survivable injury to me. In a world of hospitals and world class surgeons perhaps, but not in a zombie apocalypse and during an attack of epic proportions. There are things in this issue – like our heroes pulling together as a real team invested

(Warning: The following review contains major spoilers. If you want to maintain the surprise of the issue, don’t read past the first paragraph.) The combination of seeming safety and comfort, while the wolf waits at the door is a formula that works well for “The Walking Dead.” It’s why the heady tension filled days of the prison were some of the best issues of “The Walking Dead,” and why these last months with our core group living inside the walls of a nearly blissful community have brought the comic back to those same strengths. In recent issues we’ve seen Rick come close to reclaiming some of his life. Finding a bit of sanity in the chaos – having a job, a house, his son safe, his friends close, and even a girlfriend. Rick getting it together, though even that came with horror (he did have to kill a woman’s husband in order to GET the girlfriend), only serves to set our teeth on edge about the shoe that is likely to drop, because for Rick Grimes there is no happy ending. Rick’s ye

The community has been compromised, zombies are everywhere, no one is safe. This event sets everyone back to a Day One scenario of vulnerability and isolation, but how will they react with the knowledge they’ve learned from years of being in the zombie apocalypse? This issue is brutally pragmatic and, while you might not like decisions made by characters, you have to work to understand them. Before judging anyone in this book, you need to reflect on what you would do in this situation. I’m sure many readers of “The Walking Dead” already have their exit strategies worked out for when the zombies rise up. If you’re serious in that contemplation, then what you see in this issue wouldn’t surprise you too much. It’s just jarring to see it come out of the mouths of people. Some might see the worst in people coming out, while others will only see smart decisions that need to be made. You’re either a survivor or someone waiting to die. Amidst the pragmatism, Michonne is given a scenario tha

“The Walking Dead” has bucked a trend it had for so long and it’s actually made the zombies the menace on the page. Rick and his friends are safe in a gated community, but once a herd of zombies surround them they don’t feel safe as much as they do trapped. It’s the little things in this arc that resonate. For years, we have been seeing Rick as a broken man with life only taking more chips off and breaking small shards into more microscopic slivers of despair and denial. In this issue, there is the feeling that Rick might just be slowly getting reassembled. Some things are going his way and it’s nice to see him catch some breaks. But what will he look like all stuck together with whatever adhesive this new world can offer? What parts can’t be fixed and what new shape will this man take? These are all questions that lay on Rick’s horizon because no one ever comes back from what he’s been through. They might survive, possibly even move on, but they don’t come back. Ever. If you look t

There are some comics that are of such stellar quality that you sometimes forget how good they truly are. You expect to have your pants blown to the moon but they only reach Uruguay and for some reason you then feel disappointed; even though most other comics barely manage to inflate your pockets. “The Walking Dead” is one of those comics, so let me take this opportunity to tell you this title is still as good as you remember and want it to be. And this issue might just get your pants into the asteroid belt. The gang are stuck in a new community that’s safe and fenced in. Life is almost reverting back to normal, if you count political power plays, abusive husbands, revenge bashings, and general zombie patrols the norm. Readers have worried that this is simply a slightly modified rehash of the prison storyline. Those people could not be bigger fools if they tried. This storyline may hold similarities to the prison arc, what with the tight confines and the external threat, but there ar

Seventy-nine issues in, Robert Kirkman still manages the mixture of soap operatics and zombie action to keep “The Walking Dead” one of the liveliest and most engaging comics in recent memory. While there is a bit of a trend in the series — survivors band together, settle in one place for a while before a climactic showdown, then move onto the next — Kirkman hasn’t been repeating himself. Each set-up and tear down comes with a unique set of circumstances and additions to the lore of the series. We also get to watch Kirkman develop, as a writer, a new set of tools and a new direction from which to ratchet up the tension and tell his story. In this issue, for example, there’s a lot of intercutting in the second half. Two parallel events — clearing the zombies outside the wall, and a tense discussion between Douglas and Aaron inside — go back and forth, alternating quickly, no more than a page at a time. The scene outside the wall plays into Douglas’ reasoning and gives more credence to

Sometimes I think I’m too hard on Robert Kirkman’s dialogue. After all, I pick up “The Walking Dead” and “Invincible” every month like clockwork and am always compelled to keep reading. So the dialogue can’t be that bad, right? Well, maybe. But every now and then you get an exchange like the one that opens this issue. One that’s so stilted and unnatural-sounding that it bears further examination. I was tempted to transcribe the entire page, but one of Kirkman’s biggest problems, dialogue-wise, is that there’s just so darn much of it. Gabriel, a preacher, is telling Douglas, leader of the new community our protagonists have just joined, how dangerous said protagonists are to said community. You’d think that in a zombie apocalypse, even in a relatively secure area, peoples’ patience for talkativeness would be pretty much exhausted by now. But nope. These two guys have no problem jawing at length about how much Douglas has no intention of forcing our protagonists out of the community, n