Focus on: The Walking Dead

The Walking Dead is an ongoing comic series following a group of survivors of a zombie apocalypse lead by straight down the line and all round good cop Rick Grimes and their struggle to create a life for themselves and their families in this new and uncertain world.

It was first published by Image comics in 2003 and was created by writer Robert Kirkman and artist Tony Moore, who was later replaced by Charlie Adlard from issue 7 onwards.







The Walking Dead has also been turned into a tv series by AMC, now on its third season.

My own experience of The Walking Dead started at BICs in 2010.  I’d never heard of the series and was reluctantly dragged into a panel by my friends and The Boy who assured me I would fall in love with it. I have to admit I’d never been a huge fan of the zombie genre, or any cinematic gorefest, and I really didn’t see why this comic series or the adapted tv show would be any different.

Well, quite simply it was unlike any zombie story I had ever come across before.

I came out of the panel absolutely hooked on the idea, bought the first trade issue and and straight away upgraded my cable package so I could watch the tv show from the very start.

 

I think what swung it for me was the shift away from the whole “running away from grotesque zombies”   thing and the focus on the psychological and practical aspects of what being a survivor in a post apocalyptic zombie infested world would really be like.

Sure the zombies are disgusting, the artwork in the comics and the make up in the series doesn’t shy away from the horrors of this new world that Rick and his family find themselves in but there is much more to it than that.

As Kirkman writes in his introduction to the first trade, “This book is more about watching Rick survive than it is about watching zombies pop around the corner and scare you...The idea behind the Walking Dead is to stay with the character... for as long as humanly possible” 

In this way the series opens itself up to much more character development than is usually possible in the traditional horror genre. And that, quite frankly is intriguing.

The Walking Dead shows not only how an apocalyptic situation can make of break a person, it also shows how, for most people, the reality lies somewhere in between the two. It examines how such severe trauma can change a person and brings out parts of them they never knew existed, for good and for bad. It shows how a surviving isn’t rarely to do with heroics and it doesn’t shy away from how different people deal with what they had to do to survive.

It is a story that makes you think as much as it makes you jump or want to shout at the pages, “No, you fool! Don’t go in there!” and that, I think is the secret to its success.  The Walking Dead gives us a taste of the reality of the zombie infested world and how our reactions to it speak of us as a species, without the need for intensive cardio training or spot on marksmanship.  Although, it never hurts to brush up on these, you know, just in case...