The Walking Dead #1

"The Walking Dead" is (as the name somewhat implies) one of those zombie comics that have become so popular as of late. I've read a few of them, and I must say, this one is the best. The opening is actually startlingly similar to the film "28 Days Later" as our hero, a small-town cop, wakes up from a coma to find that the world has been overrun by zombies and everything he knew and loved is missing or outright destroyed. That similar starting point aside, after that the story takes on a really unique flavor for a zombie story. It's not so much about the zombies themselves, but about our hero, the ragtag group of survivors he joins, and how they try to rebuild after the cataclysm.

Yeah, I know that a lot of zombie movies, at least the really good ones, are "commentaries on society" instead of straight horror flicks. That's very true. But every zombie movie has to have an ending. With "The Walking Dead" being an ongoing comic, and therefore open-ended, we get to see facets of life in a "zombie world" that we rarely see in a zombie movie. The comic is almost never about the immediate threat of a zombie attack (in fact, it becomes clear that many living humans are far more dangerous in this new world than zombies are). It's about how people get by after their entire world has been stripped away from them. That means it really runs the gamut of human emotion -- from terror to grief to anger. It's very dark, often painful, frequently moving, and even occasionally funny. It's like real life.

Really, this story would work almost as well in any global catastrophe scenario, from nuclear war to apocalyptic meteor strike. It's about how people survive, not what they're surviving.

Ficção / HQ, comics, mangá