The Walking Dead

in a world ruled by the dead,

we are forced to finally start living. 

The world has ended in the form of zombies. Infected human beings with fleshy decay and rotting corpses. The pungent smell of rotting flesh floats across still breathing souls and instills nausea. Slow moving, fiercely hungry, and all sorts of dumb are what the zombies in this graphic novel are. Days Gone Bye was the one I had bought and is the first in the volume. The cover art is very attractive, with zombies seemingly walking towards you as their next meal, and a picture in a frame broken in the back ground. Instantly you know its about zombies (if you didn't get the hint from the title) and you almost can't wait to open it to see what the illustrations hold inside. 

Even though the front cover has a few colors, the inside has no color what so ever. It is all black and white line with ink washes, but I almost prefer it like that. The style of the illustrations are stylized in a way that suits the mood of the graphic novel. It is a little realistic in the way the people are portrayed but the stylistic quality gives it a more graphic novel feel. 

The type in this novel is very minimal, the story is mostly told through expressions in the face and the atmosphere in the back ground. Most of the word bubbles don't have more than a sentence or two in them, if that. It does not take hold of the entire illustration that it is on top of but seamlessly choreographed in with it. Fitting almost as perfect as a glove and not weighing down or distracting from the visuals. I think that if it had more text I wouldn't have been so drawn to it. 

The Walking Dead starts out how I've seen many other zombie type stories begin. There is a guy who gets shot or injured (in this case shot) and taken to the hospital. There he lies in a coma for a week or so (and some how not eaten) and wakes to find that he is alone in a hospital full of dead humans. Confused and scared he makes his way to his house and yadda yadda sets out to find his wife and child. For some odd reason everyone always things that big cities will be safe, which is just all sorts of dumb, but he heads for Atlanta. He finds a horse on the way there and then rides it most of the way to Georgia, where it ends up getting eaten by a horde of zombies. Which was a sad part, but I'll try not to think about it. He finds his wife and his kid and bla bla happy times. Then they stay close to the city and don't move even though the main character wants to move the group that they are with. Blah blah blah story goes on, zombies kill a few, make some zombies. 

Then the ending is just a total wow shocker. It just threw me through a loop and I sat there after inhaling the whole thing in two hours just sitting there in shock and disbelief. I wont ruin it for anyone who reads this because that would just be super spoiler alert. This is defiantly one of my favorite new graphic novels to read and I will be buying the whole series just to find out what happens. At first when I started reading it I thought it was going to have a cookie cutter type plot line to it like many other zombie stories, but this one proved me to be wrong. For now. 

it's not the same as killing the dead ones






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