Best Zombie Comic Book

Note from the author: Yeah, I know. But I like making the banners.

The late-1990s/early-2000s (well, now mid- to late-2000s, and it's still going strong) zombie revival finds one of its best outlets in Robert Kirkman's comic book series The Walking Dead. Following in George Romero's footsteps, it's less interested in the zombie gore than in how people react to extreme situations. We join the main character, a policeman named Rick Grimes, in a painfully obvious 28 Days Later-inspired beginning: after being injured in a shootout, he wakes up in an abandoned hospital and wanders around shouting "hello? hello?" until he encounters his first zombie. After that shaky start, the series finds some original ground to tread; when Rick makes his way to Atlanta to discover the real extent of the horror and then manages to meet up with a small band of survivors including his wife and son, the series recovers from its weak beginning. It turns into an engaging epic devoted to a long-term exploration of the practical and psychological effects of a zombie takeover.

In the best zombie stories, the zombies aren't the focus, and they aren't scariest thing around. They're pretty predictable: they want to eat the main characters, and they can be expected to take the most direct route to achieving that goal. The real unpredictability comes from the humans. How are they going to react to this new world, after everything they came to know has been overturned? Kirkman understands this, and the bulk of the drama in this series comes from the interactions between the survivors. The first six-issue arc deals with Rick's adjustment to the new world order, his assumption of leadership duties, and his growing conflict with his best friend and former partner, who is in love with Rick's wife Lori. In the old world, these relationships would have been the stuff of soap operas, but here, when nothing is the same, they become life-or-death situations. (Of course, going to the bathroom is a life or death situation when there are zombies afoot.) Later, the search for safe lodgings and the unpredictability of the survivors they meet provide the bulk of the tension.

Kirkman wants to touch on social angles, but it's here that he seems the least comfortable. Early issues mention gender roles; later he presents racial profiling and gay marriage. These usually feel perfunctory, or, worse, overblown, like when Rick insists on his new rule "you kill, you die"—yeah, it's about capital punishment, but he could have found a less strident way of dealing with it. Kirkman is better at the subtler issues, like the general dehumanization the characters experience. It wasn't until one scene where they're figuring out a method of killing the zombies by stabbing them in the head through a wire fence that I realized how blasé they'd gotten, how accepting of death they'd become. Most of the characters have a moment when the dehumanization of the zombies hits home, and each of them is moving in that direction. Midway through the series, we begin to wonder whether the title "Walking Dead" might apply to the living and nonliving alike.

One of the best arcs occurs when the wandering survivors find a gated community and think they've found a permanent stronghold against the zombie hordes. It's here that Kirkman comes closest to George Romero's level of social critique. The community was a sort of paradise before the plague, a place where rich white people fled to escape the world's problems, but those very gates turned into death row for most of them. Their next stop, a prison, completes the overturning of the old order, as the walls that were intended to keep prisoners in become the only thing that can keep the zombies out. Other storylines don't work as well: the various jealousies that arise among the survivors sometimes turn into soap-opera stuff, and a serial-killer subplot that takes up much of the third volume seems like an effort to pad the storyline—but it does lead to the series's single best two-page spread, a nearly wordless nightmare in which Rick seems to crack.

The story plays out in convenient six-issue arcs, and Icon has been releasing a new trade paperback for each arc. They're nice because they're a little bit cheaper, but you miss out on one of the best things about the series: Tony Moore's astounding covers, the best of which is #9. There's a distinct change in the art after issue #6, when Moore left for other projects (but stayed on to do the covers, as he continues to do) and the team of Charlie Adlard and Cliff Rathburn took over. It's looser, with more of a reliance on gray tones than on the contrasts that Moore favored. It took a while to get used to: characters suddenly looked different, like Glenn, who looked vaguely Asian under Moore's pen and less so under Adlard and Rathburn. Moore was more given to dazzling full-page spreads, while Adlard and Rathburn's style is more claustrophobic, but it fits the direction of the story. The change in tones mirrors the change in the book: Rick's initial optimism has faded; his best friend flipped out; and he's now in charge in a situation where none of the rules he knows apply anymore.

The series has hit its early 30s by now (I wrote this a while ago to submit to a now-dormant site), and Kirkman has kept the level of quality pretty high; there are some dips into subplots that don't quite work, and I'm not wild about a particularly gruesome recent issue dealing with torture (the zombie gore doesn't bug me, but that did). But given Kirkman's generally great efforts, I'm sure the series will recover from this misstep. I just read issue #34, which ends with a jaw-dropping surprise, the kind of thing that makes you love and hate the monthly format—I want to know what happens now now now!—and it looks like he's back to his old form.

Oscar Predictions

My blog was broken for a long time, so I never got around to posting my usual pre-Oscar stuff, and now it's too late—I'm leaving in twenty minutes for an Oscar party. That gives me just enough time to post my predictions.

Picture: Little Miss Sunshine
Director: Martin Scorsese, The Departed
Actor: Forest Whitaker, The Last King of Scotland
Supporting Actor: Eddie Murphy, Dreamgirls
Actress: Helen Mirren, The Queen
Supporting Actress: Jennifer Hudson, Dreamgirls
Adapted Screenplay: The Departed
Original Screenplay: The Queen
Cinematography: Children of Men
Art Direction: Dreamgirls
Costume Design: Marie Antionette
Foreign Film: Pan's Labyrinth
Animated Feature: Happy Feet
Documentary Feature: An Inconvenient Truth
Editing: The Departed
Makeup: Pan's Labyrinth
Sound Editing: Pirates of the Caribbean
Sound Mixing: Pirates of the Caribbean
Visual Effects: Pirates of the Caribbean
Original Score: The Queen
Original Song: "Listen" from Dreamgirls
Documentary Short: The Blood of Yingzhou District
Animated Short: Maestro
Live Action Short: West Bank Story

Tally: Dreamgirls (4); Pirates of the Caribbean, The Departed, The Queen (3 each); Pan's Labyrinth (2). Is that possible? The Best Picture winner goes all Grand Hotel and wins only one award? What a year. I hope I'm wrong about a lot of these.

2006 Goaties: Best Documentary

Carried along by Michel Gondry's direction, Ellen Kuras's instinctive camera work, and the crackerjack editing, Dave Chappelle's Block Party flits about in time, following the planning and execution of a New York block party hosted by Dave Chappelle. Several of the segues between rehearsals and live performances gave me pleasant shivers, while the film's forays into Chappelle's home turf in Ohio and its exploration of the very different Bed-Stuy setting for the concert are sometimes giddy, sometimes surprisingly introspective. A friend said it felt like Dave Chappelle was running for office, and I suppose that's correct, but that office is "nice and approachable guy who hasn't been changed by his huge $50 million contract," a motivation for the block party that the film digs into without calling undue attention to it.

And then there's the music. I've already discussed Kanye West's fabulous entry and the magnificent rush of the reunited Fugees, but everybody, from Mos Def and Talib Kweli (not sure if they were performing as Black Star or not, but they were on fire) to Erykah Badu, gave inspired performances.

Sure, it's not a traditional documentary, as it "documents" something that probably wouldn't have happened if not for the prospect of documenting it, but some documentaries exercise the same kind of control (he rationalized), and it's much more than just a concert film, so I say it counts. And besides, it's great fun.

2006 Goaties: Best Supporting Actor

There's a lot of shooting and running around going on in 16 Blocks, but if anything, it loosens up Mos Def. He slouches through most of the film with his shoulders hunched up, as if from a lifetime of expecting someone to hit him suddenly. He walks in short, rapid steps, his body closed tight against the world. By the end of the film, when he's both (1) not dead and (2) accepted as a person, not just as "the kid" or "a little hemorrhoid" or even an important witness, he's relaxed and open.

He talks nonstop in a flat, underenunciated, nasal whine, like he's proclaiming his existence at the same time that he expects nobody to be listening to him. This commentary on the world leads to belly laughs (take his comment on the official photo of a smiling Bruce Willis—"This what you look like when you smile? Probably drunk there too.") but also to unexpected inroads into his character. He's internalized as a motto "everything happens for a reason," but we can tell two things simultaneously: he believes that he deserves all the bad things that have happened in his life, but he hopes that someday the stars will align in his favor.

If he's great when he's talking, he's better when he's listening. So many actors either drop off or demand too much attention when they're not the focus, but he shows an intuitive screen-sharing ability. In a timeout in the middle of a gunfight, the head bad guy (David Morse) is trying to convince Willis that Def is unredeemable, and Def is observing Willis's reactions. He's uneasy and watchful, believing that Willis will change his mind and give him up. But he's also deeply hurt, both by what Morse is saying—"I never did no armed robbery!" he exclaims at one point, unable to keep it in anymore—and by Willis's appraising looks, as if the grungy cop must believe the litany of abuse, at least a little. Later, after a dog-tired Willis has said "I'm not a good guy, Eddie, I'm not a good guy," Def returns that appraising look, at least at first; then there's a hint of a smile, the tip of his tongue on his teeth, and he says with a little nod of his head, "Yeah, me neither." The film spends a lot of time showing the two men drawing together, but that glance and that pause say everything that needs to be said.

One might argue that Willis and Def are co-leads, that by calling Def a supporting actor I'm indulging in the kind of category fraud the Oscars have made their metier. Perhaps. But Willis gets the beginning and the end of the film for himself; Def is notably absent when all the external conflicts are worked out, and the main conflict is about whether Willis will "do what he always does" and give in to his cowardice and corruption.

Runners-up: The Departed provided oodles of great supporting performances. Mark Wahlberg wandered into the film off the set of a David Mamet project, poetically enunciated streams of invective intact. Joining him, but from the set of an R-rated cop comedy, is Alec Baldwin, who knows he's the funniest guy in the room and can't help laughing at his own jokes.