the walking dead reminds me a lot of invincible, another robert kirkman book. it's very binge-able, as the story rarely has slow points where you can sit down and breathe. i actually can barely remember any instances of an issue just being a long origin story where we see how someone was before the outbreak, and how that led them to the actions they would later make. this probably leads to the biggest flaw of the series, which is that it can be hard for care for certain characters - often times we barely know them before they get blown up or eaten and have their role replaced by someone else. sure, part of the point is to show how little time these characters end up having to spend with others, but it also just makes it feel too cheap. up until the saviours arc, the series felt like a guilty pleasure read: lets throw action and sex and at the end of every issue there's some big reveal of cliffhanger that makes you want to open up the next one. often times the biggest faults of the walking dead feel like the fault of the medium itself, even though that's not necessarily true: comics don't HAVE to be like this, they just often are.

at some point though, the series does become legitimately enjoyable and something i respect. i think eventually, as a lot of the characters that actually make it through the series change as people, we feel real progress. characters like rick, andrea, negan,
and i have to even give props: carl could have been FAR more annoying here. i think what they did with michonne was needed as well, because without flaws she was just "le cool samurai lady", which is more appropraite for funko pops than pieces of fiction. these changes make us care about the characters and what will happen to the world, as opposed to just endless mayhem.

i'm not sure if robert kirkman had this vision for the walking dead all along, but i doubt it as a reader. i'd say there's a lack of interesting character progression for quite a while, and negan is pretty much the only interesting villain in the entire series. alpha and the skin walkers are kind of interesting, but the governor just felt like a one-dimensional, extremely edgy boring villain. apparently he's more nuanced in the show, but the show looks like dog shit. and even then, negan is very 2011 online deadpool type humor. perhaps that makes it more impressive that the series does eventually become interesting, that it feel like it has things to say.

spolier talk: even the way both series change over time is quite similar. we see large timeskips, and sort of "epilogues" where our hero's kids and grandkids create a more ideal world to live in. as well, it's easy to notice some common themes: both mark and rick struggle with losing their humanity or life ever going "back to normal", and both struggle with playing god, especially when deciding if someone should receive the death penalty

however, the lessons on capital punishment seem different here. in invincible, mark ultimately regrets not killing the big baddy when he could have, as it would have prevented a lot of conflict. but in the walking dead, rick sparing negan actually works out really well: negan seems to have genuinely changed as a person with actual remorse, and helps rick a lot. i was actually surprised, reading everything past the timeskip i was sure that negan would show his old ways eventually, but what happened was a better choice.

there's still a lot more i could say about the walking dead: i did read almost 200 issues, after all. you can make a lot of lazy analogies about what the zombies represent politically and whatnot. but the walking dead did pretty well for a comic book that spawned a shitty-looking show, and turned from a guilty pleasure to something i legitimately looking forward to reading, as opposed to a time-killer. gotta hand it to robert kirkman, he can write some interesting stuff, and series like these show why image has been so beneficial for the comics industry.

The Whisperers, and their leader, Alpha - super creepy.
Then, another community found. And, of course, the dead.
Definitely, this was the series in decline. I almost didn't finish this, but am glad that I did, as they wrapped things up pretty well at the end. I'm a little curious about the television show, but I'm going to give it some time. Sort of 'zombied' out at the moment... ( )

Finally our long national nightmare is at an end. Finally no one has to read anymore Walking Dead comics.

I found this a volume of two halves. The first half was enlivened by the "Negan reforms" subplot, Negan being one of basically two characters I have ever given a shit about in this series.

But then Negan departs the series and it goes on to be more "Rick waffles about a thing." Rick's community discovers a massive society out in Ohio, but they are dystopian. I found a lot of this improbable. The first journey to the other society was very lengthy and protracted over weeks; by the end of the book, it felt like the characters were zipping back and forth in hours. (There's one bit where a group of characters comes to the rescue of another by coming a day later. Why would you decide one day after someone left to follow them in the case they needed help at the end of their weeks-long journey? And how come you couldn't get one group member to run a little faster and catch them up?) The new society has a rule that everyone automatically gets the same social status as they had before the zombie apocalypse... but like, why? And how would that be enforced? Why would everyone buy into it?

There's potential in finding a new group of survivors who did things differently than Rick and thus were more successful (usually they only find less successful groups), but as always Kirkman manages to strip the debate of all nuance by making the people with a different perspective slatheringly evil. And as always Rick seems like he's going to face a moral dilemma, but doesn't have to make an actual hard choice because events take it out of his hands.

The epilogue issue is dumb, too. Everyone venerates Rick, but I don't know why, because what useful thing did Rick ever actually do? In his final issue, Rick talks about how they can create a new society with potential to undue the mistakes of the old one... when we actually see the new society, it's just as shitty as ours. Well done, mate, you sure showed how good your values were.

Plus the revelation that the series's back cover blurb is an in-universe inscription on a statue of Rick is staggeringly stupid.

Anyway, I don't know why I staggered all the way to the end even though I never really liked this series except in short spurts, but it was always a quick read at least. You couldn't pay me to start watching the tv show, though.