The Walking Dead #60

I've next to nothing to say about The Walking Dead #60, except that I continue to be quite pleased by the pace and tone of the current story arc.

This issue follows Abraham, Rick and Carl after they've retrieved Morgan and are running from a zombie "herd" of two-thousand or more. Apart from touching base with the remaining crew a couple of times, we stay breathlessly with the foursome as they devise a subterfuge to ditch their grave-scented pursuers. In an expertly crafted sequence, a morbid discovery does a subtle number on Morgan's addled conscience. There's some fucked up shit with the twins that provides further evidence of Kirkman's emerging theme: postapocalyptic life is not romantic or liberating, but rather an unceasingly hostile plane that can lead only to madness.

Adlard is getting even better at composing and detailing in actual-size format. He pulls out a lot of really stylish framing and poses. Some of them are quite lovely.

I guess I'll have to wait till #61 to find out the meaning of the final panel. I hope it's what I think it is!

The Walking Dead, issue #59

Hallelujah! Actually, coming from a Catholic background, it's really Alleluia for me.

This issue hits all my happy spots, starting by breathing lightly against my neck, then running its fingers down my trembling sides and nibbling my earlobe while whispering dirty, dirty promises.*

It's quick-moving, relatively light on dialogue (and what dialogue we get is generally brusque), covers a lot of territory in just a few action-packed pages culminating in a perfect mid-scene, un-silly cliffhanger ending. Kirkman hauls us back to the hair-raising scenarios that hooked us into this series. As I've mentioned before, Adlard's best work is his zombies. If we were to graph me nitpicking his art, we'd see that my whining's highest when zombie content is low. This issue dishes up our friendly neighborhood shamblers in spades, and Adlard rises to the occasion. The high water mark is a *superb* double-splash, capitalizing on some pulse-pounding action.

I have no idea how it will resolve; I'm on pins and needles. This issue is clearly the payoff I've been waiting for. (Who doesn't mumble and whine in line? Even in line for something awesome. I'm guilty.)

I repeat the point I articulated several posts ago: month-to-month is no way to read The Walking Dead. I'm sure that for youngsters in the sixties and seventies, getting a quarter to spend on books was a special treat, and they wore that quarter thin every day after school, reading and re-reading each issue for four weeks, their grubby li'l fingers leaving it filthy and dog-eared. Never distracted by the legion multimedia that today keeps our heads snapping in a different direction every twelve seconds, these kids had the time and tenacity to commit that issue to heart. They knew exactly what resolution to hope for with the next issue and never lost the narrative thread.

Couple that with the fact that comics at that time were written for kids who needed a spandex-befitted fix every month, written to be punchy and rewarding every time, and you can see why a mature title like The Walking Dead is really not suited for monthly reading. The plot takes time to ripen. The characters are usually interesting to observe just *being*. There are a lot of lulls while these things happen, and those lulls are critical.

They're critical because they are definitively punctuated by issues like this, #59, blowing your balls clean off. If every issue were like this, the title would've been an insane adrenaline-fest, ass-kicking as a horde of hyperactive tweens having their way with a donkey piñata, compulsively readable but ultimately empty. It would've burned out years ago.

Instead, Kirkman gives us a well-paced, thoughtful, long-reaching narrative that (I can't say it enough times) is undeniably best enjoyed in collected format. (Now, whether that is a series of stapled floppies or a trade paperback is left to your preference. I'm a big trade fan, myself, but that's because a: I'm cheap, b: I'm clumsy, and c: I believe the collectibility of modern comics is negligible if not dead.)

Next time you read me bitching about an issue being slow, direct my short-ass attention back to this entry and I'll promptly STFU.

Another note: When Adlard switched to drawing his pages actual-size several issues back, there was a marked drop in the quality of the faces, with eyes clearly misplaced, mugs flattened, etc. I think he's finally starting to get his footing again and is beginning to master the smaller layout. There are only a small handful of WTF faces in this issue. Most of the art has come up to the level Adlard established when working full-size. High five, Charlie!

See? I'm not so insistent a whiner as you've empirically observed me to be.

*I'm not so Catholic anymore, but I feel like I ought to say some Hail Marys just now.

The Walking Dead, Issue #58

Last month's prognostication:

Can't wait to read BFF Handlebar McWeepy's touching-ass Vaseline-lens family flashback.

It didn't shake out exactly that way. Instead of a visual flashback, we're given a solemn recounting by Handlebar (apparently "Abraham", which I had to look up) of exactly how he lost his family.

Kirkman's heart is in the right place. I just don't know where his head is at.

In spite of what he may think, these extreme events experienced or retold with emotional frailty are neither touching nor shocking anymore, at least to me. They still have power over Rick, though, whose eyes bug out of his head as he hears Abraham's story. Why? After years of outrageous trials and losses, why are Kirkman's characters not as desensitized as we are?

Again, he overuses dialogue to come around to a very simple, powerful point, one that would have been served better through minimalism. Adlard matches his lazy stride through this segment. Things take a turn for the better when the crew approaches Morgan's house. Adlard bats one out of the park with his sweeping shots and with the depiction of Morgan's palpably maniacal state through excellent facial renderings. (Challenge: See if you can spot the vastly different panel where Adlard appears to ape Romita Jr. Winner gets a virtual handshake!) Of course Adlard wouldn't have gotten as far as he has without kicking ass at drawing zombies. I wish he got to flex this muscle more. His illustration of little Duane is chilling.

As much as I complain about Kirkman extending scenes beyond the limit their content can sustain, I truly wish that roping Morgan into joining their expedition had been a little less quick and easy. (He does manage to squeeze in some stale adages about the inhumanity of the undead.)

Lastly, the Mullet Moment--you'll know it when you come to it--reads like a reader complaint addressed within the pages. Curious!

Overall, not a terrible issue, but certainly not one that shakes off the shackles that have been holding this book back. I look forward to the return to terse action. District of Columbia, here we come!

Walking Dead, issues #54 and #55

Our comic shop is like forty minutes away. We don't make it there every month. Occasionally, reviews may lag and then clump. Apologies.]

Well, last month's good will, high hopes, and dramatic promise were squandered on two tedious, talky issues. You might not agree that dialogue is a shamefully weak point of this series--you'd be wrong. It's a blight. It's an indulgent, junior-high-drama-class space waster.

The best, tightest zombie stories--in all media--have little talking and absolutely zero overexplanation. Everything is dry, ineffectual, incomplete. Understated. The exceptional

soliloquoys or exchanges then stand a chance of being truly startling or moving. (It's impossible here not to think of Ben's hallmark recollection in Night of the Living Dead.)

I understand Kirkman's predicament. A 22-page comic with limited dialogue seems like a liability. The team has to compensate for the quick reading time with stunning art (in this case, stunning in grayscale) and an engaging story (in this case, one that maintains dread). What Kirkman fails to understand is that his dialogue is a worse liability. The story's there, for sure, as long as it's not spelled out page after page (a tough trick when characters have little to do), and the art is strong enough. Really, the art needs to be nothing more than the passable, simple set dressing of a surprisingly adept community theater performance. Unfortunately Adlard's art is most times passable, sometimes great, and sometimes downright lousy. More and more recently I find myself just staring at one of his faces going, "...what... the... fuck?" This is likely a product of renewed schedule adherence and Adlard's recent decision to create the originals at the same scale as the final pages. Hell, when every face is the size of your thumb, I guess occasionally the eyes are going to be just a notch too high into the forehead. What can you do? (Keep in mind, I fall in with the faction that thinks that the original magic of the series was dependent on Tony Moore's artistic contribution. When he left, the writing suddenly seemed clunkier to us. Yet nearly fifty issues later, we're still reading. Hmm.) Ultimately, zombies as a genre achieve a better effect (with less effort) by almost any film than by monthly comics of this particular caliber. When you've got a slow, intense story with no stunning graphics to fall back on, a glut of jaw-wagging seems better than nothing.

And so we arrive back at Kirkman's dialogue. Issue #54 presented one of my worst pet peeves, something I generally consider to be the mark of an intellectual elitist. A character is established as being working-class, or uneducated, or urban, or what have you, yet their speech patterns, vocabulary, interests, and philosophical style are inconsistent with these established traits.

Writer: Now I'll just have Johnny Bluecollar wax poetic for a moment, comparing the situation to Plato's Allegory of the Cave.

Readers: OMG This is blowing my mind this character is so LAYERED!!!!!! He seems dumb but then he comes out with something so DEEP AND ARTICULATE AND EDUCATED!!!!!!!!!! I'M MORE INTERESTED IN THE CHARACTER NOW, HIS SURPRISING CONVENTIONAL INTELLIGENCE HAS EARNED MY RESPECT

Me: Are you kidding? The character's "intelligence" is completely framed within the writer's own parameters for intellectual values. Why can't Johnny speak in a way consistent with his education and still say something moving, something profound... but in his own terms, without resorting to cultural shorthand or squeezing himself into the writer's traditional perceptions of What Makes Intelligence and What Earns Respect? Can't we respect him without him using ten-dollar words or summoning up some cheap and improbable literary coinage?

Writer and Readers: NO

All that being said, Kirkman's offense in this issue is minor, merely a permutation of the oft-hammy style of dialogue that weighs down the first half of issue #54, wherein our heroes hash out plans on the ol' farm with the new military trio before being forced to run for it. Their need to escape the farm is contrived by an impossibly illogical decision by a character who is supposed to be proving he knows better.

What follows is an issue-and-a-half of always-popular seige-and-flight, and GAWD is it boring. After a couple good moments in #54 (and much more talking, of course), the zombie threat becomes peripheral at best. Issue #55 focuses on Rick's mental instability (a nightmare, then more with the damn phone). There's a harmless interlude in which one of the new crew surprises us by asking some questions about zombie behavior that has never happened before in the series until that very page.

They camp out for the night Maggie's already-one-note character arc ends with the same 24pt, fire-engine red exclamation point! that Kirkman has been falling back on the entire series for various characters (hint: she's fuckin' crazy!), the very crutch I explored in my last post.

Overall, a disappointing pair of issues. It's reasonable to conclude that such a lull in action and zombie presence can only point to Big Things on the horizon, which I remain psyched about.