Well before
The Walking Dead became a ratings
champion on AMC this year, the franchise had a notable following in the comics
world. Starting in 2003,
The Walking Dead
first appeared as a monthly
black-and-white comic published by Image , is still being published as such,
and has been written the whole time by Robert Kirkman and drawn for the most
part by Charlie Adlard (aside from issues 1 through 6, which Tony Moore who
illustrated). As a comic,
The Walking
Dead is coming up on 80 issues and seven years, and, after having read
Issues 1 through 78, it appears to only be getting stronger.
A few things
strike me immediately about The Walking
Dead as a comic. In the first place,
for the zombie apocalypse genre, TWD is remarkably disciplined in its approach
to pacing, which is to say that, while there is certainly plenty of action and
many unpredictable plot turns and twists, Kirkman does not appear to throw
things in unless they are a development of character, situation, or
setting. Some have called TWD a very “talky”
comic, but the pages are rarely if ever filled with unnecessary dialogue or
narrative, and you will often find many sections where the story unfolds in
tight, economic images, panel to panel, with not a word on the paper.
You don’t get
seven years into a writing story about the zombie apocalypse (and maybe two
years of story time) without getting past the initial thrills of a survival
story. This has to be more than a 90
minute Hollywood feature, so some deeper questions are explored. How difficult do some survivors find it to
let go of their loved ones – even those who have become undead? When civilization has collapsed, how might
some survivors revert to deception, criminality, immorality, and evil? Is it worth having children? Do you allow children to remain innocent of
how the world has changed? When there’s no
more electricity and gasoline, how do you live?
When there’s nothing left to scavenge from the store shelves, how do you
eat? What happens to the planet when
there’s five or six billion zombies endlessly searching for flesh to eat?
Charlie Adlard, who
makes the most of the black-and-white format, is at his best when working in
the blacks to create tremendously bold shadows and a sense of feeling trapped,
although his work in lighter tones create, at times, an almost bleached-out
effect. It’s as if in the world of TWD,
there’s either too much light or not nearly enough. I particularly admire the way in which Adlard
shades the eyes of and allows for a fully rotted-out mouths of his zombies. He’s also particularly attentive to the
wounds, scratches, and scars of the characters; you really feel as if these
people are deep in the fight month after month.
There are images in the comics (from both Adlard and Moore), though,
that are so strong, they are bound to work their way into the storyboarding of
the series, as did the now-iconic image of Rick Grimes on horseback arriving in
a destroyed Atlanta.
Viewers of the series
The Walking Dead
should be encouraged
to learn – just as I did – that although Frank Darabont and his team did change
many aspects of the story in the six-episode mini-season this past fall, they
can still make full use of almost all of the material from the comic’s
seven-year run. The relationship
triangle between Rick and Lori Grimes and Shane Walsh has yet to be resolved,
and Carl Grimes is a much fuller character as the story develops in the
comics. The pizza delivery guy Glenn
becomes much more than an excellent scavenger as time passes, and
camper-driving Dale and blonde Andrea have steps to take as well. Some of the most significant characters –
Michonne, Tyreese, and The Governor – and settings – Hershel’s farm and the
prison – have yet to be even hinted at.
In short, the television show has really just scratched the surface. As with
Lost
(at its best) and
Battlestar Galactica
(almost always), there should be the potential at any moment to have one of
those “Holy crap!” scenes that brings you out of your chair.
In the meantime,
if you can’t wait for the series to be back on the air in October, you’ve got
seven years worth of comics you can read.
Just don’t say I didn’t give you a big spoiler alert.
NOTE: My thanks
to Andrew “Headshot” Miller for loaning me his collection of The Walking Dead.
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by John Szwed. Find the review here on the UK Guardian website. Here's a webcast event with the author sponsored by the Library of Congress if you'd like to hear Szwed himself say a little bit more about the project.
and Squeeze Play
, talks about Mickey Mantle and her new biography, The Last Boy: Mickey Mantle and the End of America's Childhood
.
series, Lonnie Brooks, Albert Collins, Clifton Chenier, Johnny Winter, Lonnie Mack, Roy Buchanan -- and on and on it goes. By the 1990s, when my brother and I really started getting much deeper into the blues, it seemed that everyone was on Alligator. Very little has changed, save for the size of the Alligator catalog and the prestige of recording for the label. Happy 40th anniversary to the folks at Alligator.
of Marsalis as the spokesperson for jazz and goes right back to those early days when the mainstream labeled Paul Whiteman as "The King of Jazz." While Marsalis is a gifted virtuoso on the trumpet, a fine composer, and a canny entrepreneur, critics are correct in pointing out that Marsalis is not the face of jazz -- not with the recent death of Dr. Billy Taylor -- not ever. From where I sit, Marsalis (but not necessarily JALC) looks a bit too much to the past, as if Miles never went electric. And the whole neo-primitive riff in the 60 Minutes piece had too much of the aroma of the Cotton Club about it, as Marsalis seemed to lean into the stereotype of sexual, sensual primitivism: "The more refined your concept, the more primitive you have to be." Marsalis may be a genius and know what he means, but mainstream America likely missed the point. The pairing of New Orleans and Havana as "sultry" and "exotic" sister cities, complete with shots of dancing girls, didn't help matters. Furthermore, the presentation of Marsalis as "America's Musical Ambassador" likewise ignores too many people. Back during the Cold War, jazz was a carefully deployed cultural force by the US State Department -- read Satchmo Blows Up the World 
or listen to Dave Brubeck's The Real Ambassadors
. These days, I'd be curious to know who's paying for those overseas JALC gigs.
.
.
and Listen to This
.
, makes an ambitious attempt to determine if there's something unique about the information age and, particularly, the nature of the Internet. Wu, a journalist and professor at Columbia University, takes on the question of what happens to information empires and why we should care about it at all. The talk of late about net neutrality and, in recent years, of warrantless domestic wiretaps might get one's attention -- or maybe just the notion that adult entertainment might vanish entirely from the Internet.
based on the famous song from 'The Wizard of Oz.'
