The Walking Dead

The Walking Dead comic series was first published by Image Comics back in 2003. Yes, It does boil my chops to know that i have been missing out on such an awesome book. All these years updating my Batman and Green Lantern collections... when I could also have been up to my ears in some bloody zombie goodness.

As i has mentioned in an earlier entry, there are some many zombie comics books out there, but the ones I had come across earlier read like B Grade movies. Now...any one that follows the zombie genre of movies, know that the B-grades make up the mass majority of it, and we've come to love that. When exposed to so many B movies..you come to love the ones that truly shine.


Well... I think The Walking Dead is a diamond in the rough here (yes, just like Aladdin) This comic reads so well. Instead of just mindless excuses to have lots of blood and gore, this comic builds such great tension and character.

It starts of with a cop that gets injured while on duty, he wakes up from a coma in an abandoned hospital only to find that the world around him consumed by zombies. It's easy to see that this zombie ride will be paying homage to the masterful zombies works before it, like the 28 Days opening for example.

Reading through the first few issues, I couldn't bring my self to stop. I wanted to see what happens next. The series kinda reminded me of the excellent Y-The last man books... Cause each book kinda focused on different people and in the end left them with crazy odds to fight or come to terms with.

The whole thing is in black and white, with some colored covers to mix things up. The storty feels a lot more old school, meaning it pulls more from the earlier classic zombie movies in terms of pacing and chracter development. It plays out by make the people more interesting and having the zombies as more of a background (yet constant) threat. The Wikipedia synopsis sums it up as:

The Walking Dead is centered around a small-town police officer from Cynthiana, Kentucky, his family, and a number of other survivors who have banded together in order to survive after the world is overrun with zombies. As the series progresses, the characters become more developed, and their personalities shift under the stress of a zombie apocalypse. Fighting growing despair — and occasionally each other — the group searches for a secure location which they can finally call home. The lives of these survivors will be changed forever.

This book is a must read for zombie fans...but I'm sure a lot of you know about this already. Just remember that I live on a tropical island where the biggest comic star is The Phantom.