Walking With Zombies

And now back to our scheduled viewing.  I may have mentioned once or twice how much I love The Walking Dead (Image Comics).  Robert Kirkman and Charlie Adlard have created a modern classic with their ongoing story of survival in the wake of a zombie apocalypse.  On the surface, the story seems trite and cliched: "something bad" has happened - nobody knows what! - which has left the world overrun with perambulatory carnivorous cadavers and the few humans who remain must fight for their existence.

All horror fans know how that story goes: usually badly, ending with a fade-out to the credits as the zombies finally break through the shopping mall.  After 90 minutes or so of struggle and strife, the characters we've come to know and love inevitably meet their sticky ends in an all-you-can-eat zombie buffet.  Right?

Not so in The Walking Dead.  Don't get me wrong, a lot of the tried-and-tested plotpoints are present here, but this series has been running for 90+ issues.  At a rate of 1 issue a month, that means this story has been unraveling for nearly 8 years.  And it's still being published today.

Playing cowboys and Indians for real: Carl in The Walking Dead

Kirkman's elevator pitch for The Walking Dead was a "zombie movie that doesn't end" and that's what he and his co-creators have produced.  This is a story about the constant pressure of survival and how living through a zombie apocalypse affects the characters in the long-term.  It's about the cumulative psychological traumas and tragedies the main players have endured, the tough choices they've been forced to make and how it all affects them, every day.

Oh, and it's also about how the real threat to survival is other human beings, not the flesh-munching zombies of horror movie fame.

But you already knew that, right?