Best Zombie Comic Book

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.