Though I feel there are more interesting comic book series around than any time in my lifetime there is no series that I am more into right now than The Walking Dead.  Sure I'm a fan of zombie movies, which I'm thinking is a huge part of it, but zombie comics are everywhere these days and most of them bore me to tears.  Even creator Robert Kirk man's Marvel Zombies miniseries, that indulge in the camp and goofiness that he so studiously avoids in his black and white Image series, aren't close to the genius that he achieves in The Walking Dead. 

     Kirkman is good at writing superheroes and may be one of the best at it currently working in comics but he is nowhere as good at that as he is at writing real people and that's just what the characters in The Walking Dead are to me.  They may be living in a zombie apocalypse but even the characters in Terry Moore's Strangers in Paradise, the brilliant romance comic book that every comic fan should read, were still living in a soap opera world.  As much as those of us who read them related to their romantic dilemmas, there was still a bit of a wall between us and the characters.  Though they appeared more complex than most characters from television and even literature they still were obviously their author's creation. 

      When one of the characters in The Walking Dead is in danger my heart leaps and a lump appears in my throat.  This is partially because of how well developed the characters are but it is also because I know that Robert Kirkman is not afraid to kill one of them at any moment.  He has rarely pulled a psyche out on us.  Usually if the characters are in a dangerous situation there will be consequences even if it isn't death.  Once I was driven almost to tears that a character might be dead only to have it revealed he had in fact survived.  Most writers are afraid to kill off popular characters but not Kirkman and because of this it makes the few times he chooses to jerk us around that much more effective.  

       Recently I reread the whole series from beginning to end and was struck by how much the characters had evolved since the series had started.  Most of the original cast was dead by this point and in fact after the bloodbath of the most recent issue (48 as I write this) I'm not even completely sure how many of the cast is alive still, let alone those who had been with the book since the beginning.  This is a pretty jarring contrast to traditional superhero comics which seem to have the goal of keeping everything as much the same as possible so that fans don't get upset.  Kirkman has recently more than delivered on his promise that No One is Safe.

     Many have compared The Walking Dead to the edgy television series that HBO and Showtime have put out in recent years and I've always thought it as bunk.  Aren't comics good enough for people?  I'll go on record to say that the HBO series based on Garth Ennis and Steve Dillon's Preacher is a bad idea but I will agree that in terms of quality these comics have it all over the kind of stories and character development you see on most television.  In fact, in rereading the whole Walking Dead series I could easily see it in television terms with issues 1-24 being season one, 25-48 as season two and what ever comes next comprising season 3.   There is a definite and clear divide between the first and second twenty-four issues and after issue forty-eight nothing will ever be the same again.

      While the first twenty-four issues dealt with the attempt to adapt to a world populated by flesh eating zombies we got to see afterward what kind of great villains human beings could still be.  Our band of survivors ended up in a war against another community called Woodbury ruled over by the psychotic "Governor".  The most controversial storyline of the series came when the governor captured Michonne, one of our heroes, and brutally raped and beat her.  Because Kirkman puts an elaborate letter page in his book we got to see a heated discussion about violence, sexism and race (Michonne is black the governor is white) take place in the letter pages.  Much of it annoyed me but how many comics offer you something like this for your three dollars.

       Though I haven't mentioned him directly, a lot of the credit for the series has to go to Charlie Adlard for his stupendous art.  Originally the series was co-created by artist Tony Moore who worked with Kirkman on several previous projects but after his departure Adlard has more than stepped up to delivering the kind of art that Kirkman's brilliant epic demands.  Kirkman considers Adlard so important that he has stated that the only way he would consider ending the series is if his artist decided to move on. Luckily that doesn't seem like a possibility anytime soon. 

         Unlike most comic book series I'm completely at a loss to figure out where exactly this series is going next.  Anybody who read the most recent installment knows what I'm talking about.  The battle was brutal and the casualties numerous.  Our comic book world has been rocked in a way that we never thought it would and Rick Grimes, the books central character since issue 1 seems to be shattered perhaps beyond all recovery.  This would make jumping on a great time for new readers.  All the trades are currently available for previous issues and comic book literature has never been finer than this series.  People should read it now before Hollywood finds it and fucks it up. 

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