Rough Trade Friday: The Walking Dead

Zombies are sort of the red-headed stepchildren of the horror industry, probably because their character development caps out pretty quickly and because they aren't so much evil as they are simply brainless and hungry. There's only so much that most writers can do with that, apparently. I've often enjoyed zombie stories, if for no other reason than for the way in which they show us how ordinary people end up reacting to the extraordinary situation of their neighbors rising up from the grave and trying to eat their faces off. If that doesn't push someone past the breaking point, I don't know what will.

Image Comics' The Walking Dead is an example of a great zombie story, probably because it has yet to reach a definite endpoint. As a result, the main characters are forced to be more than a bunch of gun-wielding badasses making their way to a safe zone because, well, there are no safe zones for them to escape to. This fact forces the characters to stay cautious and smart because they know that they are never really safe from the force that destroyed their old lives and killed so many of their loved ones.

The protagonist of the series is Rick Grimes, a small town sheriff who awakens from a coma (a la 28 Days Later) to find his world has been washed away by the tide of the Zombie Apocalypse. Originally seeking out (and eventually finding) his wife and son, Rick ends up recruiting a large rotating cast of characters in a quest to survive in this strange new world. Many of the characters meet spectacularly gruesome ends along the way, only to be replaced by others; some of the replacements themselves pass on in equally unsubtle ways, and some are still around at the time I write this... but every character in the series is monumentally changed by the things they see and are forced to endure.

Robert Kirkman's sharp writing, combined with the black-and-white art of Tony Moore and Charlie Adlard makes this bleak series an addictive read. If you can find it, I would recommend picking up the hardcover edition because it contains so many issues in one go. However, even if you can't snag the oh-so-shiny hardcover version, the individual collections are much more readily available at most bookstores. So go, my little ghouls and goblins, and kick off this October zombie style!