THE WALKING DEAD: Compendium 1 by Robert Kirkman, Charlie Adlard, et al. (Image)

So we're two weeks away from the premiere of AMC's Walking Dead, and for once I'm determined to get in on one of these big everyone's-talking-about-it serial teevee shows from the beginning. I've never felt very tempted to check out the comic, because no amount of buzz or acclaim has ever overcome my suspicion that it's just a particularly well-done but still by-the-numbers zombie apocalypse tale. The extremely generic title, the covers, and a casual flip-through glance at the inside art are all it's ever taken to reassure myself I'm not missing anything special. When someone tries to explain that it's "really about the survivors," I'd shrug and think, Whatever. But I know there's going to be some cross-blog discussion when the show gets rolling, and I'd like to be part of it, and so in preparation, I broke down and bought this hefty (1000+ page!) tome, which collects 48 issues/8 trades.

I'm glad I went big. This whole thing makes for one hugely satisfying slab of story, but I simply can't imagine following it in floppies, and although I was always happy to keep turning pages as long as there were pages to turn, I don't think any of these trades would have motivated me to keep going if I actually had to run out and buy the next one.

Ironically, that's partly a tribute to Kirkman's success in evoking a sense of life just going on because that's what life does, even in the wake of something so game-breaking as a zombie apocalypse. This simulated sense of watching life unfold, rather than a story, removes any expectation of closure. Even the longest-lived superhero series, and those that promise to continue on as long as there are comics, remain fundamentally story-shaped, meaning that despite the neverending continuity, they're punctuated at intervals with the "sense of an ending" as story arcs resolve. In Kirkman's world, crises arise and are handled (or not!), but strictly speaking, nothing resolves or provides any closure. Where another story would begin in a superhero comic, in Walking Dead, the traumatized survivors can only moan, "What the fuck is it now?"

The upshot of this is that, for the first seven volumes, any jumping-off point seems as good as any other. An overarching climax exerts a kind of gravitational pull to keep readers reading, and its absence is felt here, even when the action rushes on with the most breathless forward momentum.

[hidden spoiler--click to expand]

Doubly ironically, that makes it all the more powerful and shocking in the eighth volume when Kirkman stages a crisis so apocalyptic (to the characters we've come to know, if not the world) that I couldn't help feeling a stunned, devastated closure as I turned the final page. It really rocked me to see all those loves, betrayals, jealousies, conflicts, moments of forgiveness, desperate strivings, sacrifices, etc., that I'd become so immersed in for so many pages, suddenly cut short, reduced to nothing, in a single paroxysm of bloodshed. That seems to render them retroactively much more poignant, but also, paradoxically, absolutely pointless, though I know both of these impressions are illusory. What has made the individual deaths leading up to this bearable, and the lives of the dead continue to seem meaningful, has been the ongoing community of which they were a part. That's exactly what gets annihilated here, and it's one hardcore hell of a gut punch. I can only imagine what it felt like to readers who'd been following WD in floppies from the start, after four years of personal investment.

What people mean when they say this series is "really about the survivors" is that the main conflicts take place between the survivors, and often within them. Mind you, the zombies are never irrelevant!--their horrifying, threatening, demoralizing presence obtrusively exerts a constant pressure on everything that happens--but they recede fairly quickly to complicating factors in (living) human conflicts that more immediately dominate the foreground. As for those human conflicts, you really just need to read them to appreciate them. They come across as very natural and inevitable, and certainly earned. They're heartfelt, and often heartbreaking. Kirkman's writing really shines here, in a way that a review simply can't convey, because engagement with the well-paced rhythms of emotional fluctuation must be experienced firsthand, and serves as its own reward.

The one exception--the one really big misstep, in my judgment--is the character of the Governor. When he first emerged as a principal antagonist in volume five, I thought he held a lot of promise as a cautionary example and gut-check for Rick, whose increasingly vertiginous moral/psychological tailspin was reaching crisis proportions as the central story-problem. That whole angle is compromised, and pretty much all the suffering the Governor goes on to inflict is cheapened, when his collection of still-"living" zombie heads and his incestuous necrophiliac pedophilia reduce him to a broad caricature of a sadistic weirdo. Granted, a zombie apocalypse would certainly bring out the worst in many people, and that "worst" would in some cases undoubtedly include unconscionable cruelty, revolting expressions of sexual violence, and/or bizarre trophy fetishes. If Kirkman had taken his typical care in establishing the tragic unleashing of these psychodynamics in the Governor, I could have bought it. That doesn't happen, though, and so the Governor sticks out from all the substantial, textured, hard-won characters as an incongruously simplistic Villain. (For the tv show, I can imagine Gary Oldman in the role, chewing the scenery to splinters.)

If I haven't said much about the art to this point, that's because it's so functional here as to almost be transparent (odd as that may sound). It tells the story, without ever being good or bad enough to call attention to itself. I never wished for a better artist, but I also never lingered over a panel or marveled at a composition or layout. If that sounds like faint praise, I can't imagine a better style for this particular comic. Although in a technical and literal sense, this comes from Image, the flashy Image style I gushed over for Blackest Night would be sorely out of place here, in undermining tension with the down-to-earth milieu, characters, and events.

So would I recommend it? Well, I would definitely recommend this Compendium. What I mention in the hidden spoiler above is what really brings this whole volume together as a rock-solid, jaw-dropping, great-comics-reading experience. If you're interested in Walking Dead, don't fuck around with floppies or even trades; just take the plunge and grab this thing. At thirty-eight bucks from amazon (which qualifies it for free shipping), it comes more cheaply than four combined trades, let alone the eight it collects. Still two weeks out from Halloween, you can still get this in time for the show, and then join me here as I discuss it, hopefully engaging with other horror and comics bloggers.