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the walking dead. [graphic content.]

By • On • In books, graphic content, nerd candy, scott • 3 min read

Have you read The Walking Dead yet? If not, you are in for a big treat my friend. It’s a fantastic comic series written by Robert Kirkman about life after the zombie apocalypse. The main character is a police officer named Rick Grimes who gets shot in the line of duty, goes into a coma, and wakes up after the proverbial shit has hit the fan (a la 28 Days Later). It is the perfect way to introduce the series, because it’s about life after the zombie apocalypse, so using the coma technique is a clean way of allowing us to adjust to the post zombie world along with our hero.

The comic book/graphic novel medium is perfect for exploring this subject matter, because the story goes on and on, and thus it can take us so much deeper into the questions and metaphors inherent in the zombie genre.

There are tons of reasons why zombie stuff is great, but one of the more important reasons is that it is rife with metaphor at the heart of American culture. It wasn’t an accident that Romero set the sequel to Night of the Living Dead at a shopping mall.

At the moment, our culture is in the midst of this bizarre war where a huge portion of the population refuses to let go of American mythology from the 50’s. We have these ideas of what it means to be American, of what “real America” looks like, and while that ideal never existed, it is even more dangerous now because it should have died a long time ago, it’s alive and kicking even though it shouldn’t be, it is undead now. Actually, Bill Willingham used this as a tiny portion of his Fables storyline, and it was utterly brilliant, but Fables must be left for another post.

Zombies represent something terrifying because they are us. They are our fear of death, our fear of our appetites, our fear of the nagging thought in the back of our minds that we are our own worst enemy, that we will bring about our own destruction.

Yet, what are we left with on the other side of that? We play with the zombie genre, and lets say we make it to the other side of the cataclysm, doing our best to survive long term in a world overrun with a horde of the undead. Then what? Well, that’s what The Walking Dead offers a potential answer to. It’s a band of survivors trying to make life work, trying to keep their children safe, trying to fall in love and find a reason to wake up each day. If everything that we think makes up our world is taken from us, where do we go from there?

Kirkman’s writing is fantastic; tense, well paced, and constantly engaging. I almost always buy what characters are doing, how they are treating each other, etc. That’s rare.

Also, it just may be the best panel work I’ve seen. The art is all black and white, and the way Kirkman and Tony Moore, followed by Charlie Adlard, lay out the panels is perfect. It’s sparse, often with very little going on within each page, creating a great relationship between the story and the art. Also, they avoid the common pitfall of accidently giving away a big moment by placing a full panel event on the right page. What I mean is that so often I accidently learn something I don’t want to know when I turn the page, because as your turn a page you see page 35 on your right before you look back to 34 on your left. If there is this huge, full color death scene (or whatever) before my eyes as I turn the page, I can’t help but see it, so even though I haven’t read the stuff on the left, I know what happens on the next page. In The Walking Dead I am consistently impressed that they build up the big moment, and then make you turn the page to see what happened. It seems like it would be a simple, obvious thing to make work, but it is rare in my experience. They take the medium seriously, and realize what the reading experience will be like.

I really love this series. In the coming world, post Z-Day, the undead won’t be our only enemies. Other humans in the world, people in our own group of survivors, even our own sanity and grip on reality becomes tenuous and dangerous. Kirkman engages the potential for story in this realm with great attention to detail, honesty, impressive character psychologies, and gifted artistic help. You should read these! (And watch the show on AMC when it finally arrives in October).

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world war z. [the as yet untitled book posts.]

By • On • In books, nerd candy, scott • 2 min read

I just finished World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War. It was hugely entertaining! Written by Max Brooks, son of legends Mel Brooks and Anne Bancroft, the work is obviously modeled after Studs Terkel’s The Good War: An Oral History of World War II. The book is a series of “interviews” done by a UN researcher ten years after humanity’s victory in the Zombie War.

Clearly, there is a great risk that the book will be pure genre blood and gore with little or no compelling narrative, or it could become so tongue and cheek that it loses all meaning. Brooks manages to avoid both of those potential pitfalls, creating a really engaging read. It is in turns hilarious and moving and there is real humanity to be found within the gore.

Brooks did some amazing research, and thus his narrative is tight. WWZ works really well as an imaginative exercise in how actual global socioeconomic and political realities would shape a real zombie apocalypse. Brooks also does a great job keeping his zombies consistent. Often, a book like this can grow to have too many moving parts and the zombies would manifest whatever traits needed for the story at a given moment. This happens constantly in film, television and fiction. Brooks seemed to set a clear physiology of his zombies first, did loads of research about various nations, economies and governments of the world, and then imagined what would happen if Z-Day were to arrive.

Each of his interviewees, from scattered locales all over the world, told stories that felt like genuine fragments of the larger story he had created outside of our view. Brooks did the work so well that many reviewers have favorably compared it Orson Wells’ “War of the Worlds.” Much of what Brooks did worked as a skewering of bureaucracy, militarism and institutions, showing how each was practically organized to fail at any attempts to prevent letting the zombie outbreak turning into a worldwide apocalypse. The fact that he never left the ground level, always letting the characters truly tell their own stories, was what kept it from feeling like there was an agenda.

If I would make a critique it would be that there were times where characters seemed to lose an individual voice, instead sounding more like Brooks himself. This was especially true in that all of his true heroes shared his disregard for faith of any kind, something that would simply be impossible in the actual religious make-up of the world, thus it comes across as a short-sighted misunderstanding of the reality that not all people of faith are extremist Muslim terrorists and lunatic Pat Robertsons or Glenn Becks. Most likely, as it has been for every single calamity in world history, faith would be a part of the problem and a part of the solution in responding to WWZ. Yet, as I write that, understand that this is a tiny critique of a book which truly was a genuine pleasure to read.

The zombie genre can be quite a bit of fun, and this book would be a great introduction for those interested in entering the zombie milieu. It is a remarkably unique sub-genre in which we can explore our fears of the end of the world, can wrestle with the reality that when the world ends it will probably be humanity that pulls down our own curtain, and where we can engage in a hodgepodge of other fun little mental games. I could go on talking about how much I love the zombie genre for a while, so I will end that conversation here… for now.

This book is a fast, engaging read, and I recommend it to all you great folks out there in the internets.

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