I just don't get it...
I love zombies; I've seen every single George Romero film. I love comics; I've been reading them for about 18 years. I should love The Walking Dead, and lord knows I've tried, but I just can't.
Volume 1 is great. The artwork is great, and the story moves at a brisk enough pace to keep things interesting, despite the sometimes naff dialogue and one dimensional characters. After finishing the first volume I couldn't wait to get my hands on volume 2. Volume 2 wasn't as good; the new artist was marginal at best, and the story/dialogue/character development side of things had gone down hill.
I started to wonder what all the fuss was about, but surely a series that sometimes finds itself mentioned alongside Y the Last Man had to have something going for it. So I soldiered on and read volumes 3 and 4. Instead of improving, the dialogue became comically bad. The pathetic female characters were not the author's attempt to comment on the male characters sexism, they were in fact, just pathetic.
Still, I decided to give the series one last shot, because despite all negatives, it was still pretty readable, (much like Budweiser is drinkable) and I'd started to care a little bit about Rick, Dale, Andrea and the rest.
Wow- I sure wish I'd stopped at four, as volume 5 is to zombie comics what the Dolph Lundgren Punisher is to comic movies. A big flaming pile o' poo, complete with one of the least believable comic villains I've ever encountered.
But hey, for some reason a lot of people are still really into this, and who am I to judge, I used to read that crap Image put out in the 90's (although this might be even more poorly written).
But if you're like me, and you liked volume 1, but weren't that into volume 2, but you thought to yourself "Hmmm, maybe this will get good again..." stop right there. It won't. It sucks. Go spend your hard earned money elsewhere.
Feedback for TPB of WD 2
The Product was exactly as described. Brand New condition. Fast shipping w/ the necessary safety parameters that ensured the quality of the book. Highly Recommend!
As we rejoin our characters, they are, well... still battling zombies
If you enjoyed the first volume of "The Walking Dead", there's no reason to not pick up this second collection. New artist Charlie Adlard's style is more scratchy and jagged than Tony Moore's smoother realistic take on things in volume one, but jagged and scratchy somehow nicely complements the story's frequent edgy jolts. This is the last handful of stories before the characters begin a long stay in an abandoned prison, so enjoy the variety of locales while you can. "The Walking Dead" isn't perfect: the bickering (between characters who have paired off into couples and between many characters in general) can get tiresome, and often there are too many dense speeches even when characters aren't bickering. But for all its faults (and they're relatively minor ones), "The Walking Dead" is nevertheless a bracing, dramatic piece of ongoing horror fiction that's a welcome antidote to usual comics fare.
Refreshing take on the genre
The Walking Dead is a very mature story that takes a look at topics ignored by many of the other examples of the Zombie Survival Fiction genre. It shows how emotion leads to action in ways that can shock modern readers' sense of stability. It provides an interesting commentary on how thin the veneer of civilization is despite all attempts by the characters to cling to it. It lets the reader experience the loss of structure and provokes thoughts of "what would I do" beyond the typical "raid the gun store, grocery store and head for a cabin in the woods" mentality we've seen before.
The entire series thus far (1-7) has been top notch and a real example of how graphic novels can tackle stories that would take a 600 page novel to cover in detail.
Maybe I Spoke Too Soon
My review for the first volume of "The Walking Dead" was pretty much glowing. The review was even titled "A Character Driven, Sprawling Epic." That's pretty much a stamp of approval. The writing which ranged from bland to good to exceptional was balanced out by Tony Moore's art, which really gave life to Kirkman's characters.
Well, Moore is no longer the series artist, starting with this volume. He still does the covers, but the new penciller for each issue of "The Walking Dead" is Charlie Adlard, and to compare his art to Moore's is like comparing the scrawlings of an elementary level child to the prose of a published author. Adlard isn't horrible, but his panels are often ugly. The action scenes fall flat because the details blend together, leaving you guessing at what is going on some of the time. A lot of the characters are drawn to look quite similar, and it leaves you forgetting who is who.
Another bad thing about losing Moore was that Charlie Adlard's art isn't good enough to mask the flaws in Robert Kirkman's writing. As far as where Kirkman is taking the story and the plots he has going on, he's doing a fine job. However, he is pretty bad at dialogue. Every character speaks the same, and no one ever seems to be casual. To keep this exposition-heavy prose "light," he throws in words like "ain't" and "man" a lot, but that isn't enough to make these forced words seem like a person would really speak them. He needs to work on giving each character a voice. Also, he needs to tone down the sexism a tad. A few of the reviewers noticed it in the first volume, but it wasn't quite as blatant as it is here. In this story, men do the tough work and women watch the children and nag the men. That needs to change. Fast.
I was convinced I was reading a great story after volume one, but now I'm less sure. I'll probably keep reading until the end (if there ever is an end), but I'm hoping that things get a lot better than this. And yeah, I really wouldn't mind a new penciller.
6/10
