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BO11: "The Walking Dead" TPB's

Historically, I've consumed comic books the old-fashioned way: pouring over monthly issues as they arrived, usually through the mail via Westfield Comics, given my distance away from any comics stores. It's only been the last few years that I've held off from buying certain monthly comics in favor of the trade paperback (TPB) collections. (It's kinda like the desire to watch TV shows via DVD collections of various seasons rather than watching individual episodes as they appear.) The TPB has been a fruitful format for me, allowing me to gorge on multiple issues of titles like Y: The Last Man, Ex Machina, Boys, and others, but I've really grown to look forward to the TPB's of The Walking Dead.

Now, I'm a monster traditionalist in that I like my vampires to be parasitic and fearsome (more Nosferatu, less CW) and my zombies to be slow and numerous, so The Walking Dead ticks that box. (And yes, there's room for a discussion why post-millennial creative works feature so many variations of vampires and zombies -- for example, Freud's observations in his 1919 essay The Uncanny that the most dread-evoking symbols are those that offer a bent mirror image to the mundane, which could be one reason why such life-but-not-life monsters connect with the masses -- but that discussion ain't happening here. Except for what just happened.) But my reasons for enjoying my experience with TWD are my own, and the main reasons are two:

(1) Much like The Road from Cormac McCarthy, TWD paints a portrait of a post-apocalyptic world, and that portrait is one of devastation to humanity in both quality and quantity. And given my own beliefs in the results of a collision between an ever-expanding amount of humans and an ever-dwindling amount of natural resources (food, land, water, etc.), stories like TWD seem a bit more anchored in a not-too-distant future, a future that I certainly don't want to face but am powerless to slow or avoid.

(2) Sarte's work No Exit offered the famous quote "Hell is other people," and while Sarte's interpretation in that context can offer a different meaning, the world of TWD is an epic realization that the key to humanity's devastation is humanity. The zombies are ubiquitous shambling reminders of that devastation, but the real narrative ebb and flow of TWD is not the gore-flecked battles between the dead and the living. Rather, what keeps me coming back are the flickering embers of hope -- a farm, a stocked pharmacy, a prison, a walled community -- that are extinguished through avarice and hubris and accident, three things that our current world has in abundance.

The fifteenth TPB of The Walking Dead should arrive on my doorstep in the next few weeks, and I'm anticipating it as I anticipate no other comic. (The TV series on AMC, while serviceable, pales in comparison.) For over a half-decade, Robert Kirkman and Charlie Adlard have been crafting quite a landmark series, and I can't wait to see how it all ends. But I hope that end is later rather than sooner.

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