comics You can always count on zombies for a good time. Those irascible brain-munchers have been pop-culture staples since at least Colonial times, trading on race/class fears to give the upper crust a little something to fret about at night. Zombies have been best used in film, from George Romero’s Living Dead movies to the excellent 28 Days series and countless flicks in between. But they’ve also had a resurgence in comics of late, between Marvel Comics’ parody book “Marvel Zombies” and this title, distinctly not a parody that has made serious inroads into making horror a viable comic genre again.
Writer Robert Kirkman isn’t adding anything new to the zombie story here. He’s just telling it really well. Rick Grimes is a Georgia police officer who gets shot on duty and falls into a deep coma. When he wakes up he finds the world he knew is gone: For some reason—still unexplained—the dead have risen and walk the earth with an insatiable appetite for live flesh. Once bitten, their victims join the mindless, undead ranks. Rick miraculously escapes the hospital-cum-charnel house and (even more miraculously) reunites with his wife and son, now part of a ragtag survivor party traveling the Southern wilderness in an R.V., desperately looking for shelter from the zombie hordes. After a particularly harrowing escape from the zombie nest formerly known as Atlanta and a close call in a suburban housing tract, “Book 2” opens with the survivors stumbling on what could be their salvation, found in the last place anyone would think to look: a maximum-security prison.
Clever twists like this demonstrate why Kirkman is one of the top up-and-coming talents in the comic industry. But more than his well-thought-out plots (of course a prison would make sense; why has nobody thought of this before?), he excels with his nuanced characters, who often behave completely irrationally—that is to say, like real people—while confronting the brutal theme at the core of any zombie story: the horrible things people do to one another. (After all, what are zombies but mindless people?) In “Book 2” that question becomes even more clear, as the survivors face the ever-present threat of the zombies inside and outside of the prison gates, but also some non-zombies in their midst with equally horrible desires in their hearts. Some of the twists in this collection are downright chilling, and this is absolutely a mature readers comic book.
Kirman’s collaborator on “Walking Dead” is Charles Adlard, a workman artist who has bounced around the industry for at least 20 years without ever finding his groove. He’s found it here. His chunky, realistic drawings perfectly render the intense emotions of the survivors and the eerily vacant expressions of the undead. Plus, he can do gore. He can really do gore. And that’s essential for any zombie story.
