I will proably go back and read this some day.. I feel like as a comic fan I should, but I just HATE zombie stories... they're all the same, and all have logic gaps to drive a truck through. 'Walking Dead isn't REALLY about the zombies' people say. Bah.


My favorite part of the series is I bought this issue off the rack towards the end of my Wednesday warrior period of comics, and re-discovered it in the Misc section of my long boxes 10 years later to sell it for a bit under $1000, which allowed me to use ebay to catch up on he MU during the time . I feel like my timing was pretty good on that.. I think that's still about the going rate for a un CGCed one.

Duly noted and corrected; thanks.

I absolutely loved Moore's art on the first dozen or so issues, and tho i got used to Adlard's art, I always thought his characters looked a bit too much alike.

glad that Moore still got/gets co-creator dividends from the TV show.

I've been a fan of this book since the 1st issue, and bought ever single one as they were released and LOVED it.

tho I wouldn't say that NOTLD was the jumping off point, tho it certainly inspired the series in the way of "what if the "story" just never ended in that world? what if the zombies never stop"

although Kirkman denied it (thru many letters pages responses), the opening chapter has a lot of similarities to "28 Days Later". . and so a lot of folks think that it was a mix of films/ideas that truly is what inspired the book.

regardless, those that say "it's not about the zombies" are absolutely correct. Love this book.


and one final thing. . the remake of NotLD that came out in 1990 directed by Tom Savini is a great re-do with some pretty strong actors. . . tho they don't really show it in his directing. great special effects tho.

#3-4 (December 2003-January 2004)




New Characters: Rick’s wife Lori and young son Carl. Rick’s fellow cop Shane. Married couple Allen and Donna, and their twin sons Billy and Ben. Widowed Carol and her young daughter Sophia. Old timer Dale, owner of the RV. Middle aged Jim. College-aged sisters Amy and Andrea.

Story: Rick meets all the folks in the camp. Dale warns Rick that Shane has his eye on Lori. Rick and Shane go hunting and deal with a zombie munching a deer; the women do laundry and gripe about their lot in life. Sophia and Carl have a sad playtime.



Rick can’t convince Shane to move the camp further from the zombies in the Atlanta urban center. So Rick and Glenn head into town to find a gun store that Jim knows about (on the fictional Pleasant Street, perhaps a name selected ironically). They sneak into the city in disguise by rubbing zombie juice on their clothes.



They have to fight their way back out when rain washes the juice off. This is the first of several tactics we'll see by which humans cope with zombies.



Back at camp, Shane and Lori discuss their now-regretted (on her part) night together on the road here.



My Two Cents: Kirkman was carefully introducing new characters gradually in the first two issues. He jumps a bunch on us here, but we’ll have plenty of time to get acquainted with them, as no more are introduced for a little while. Rick’s son Carl is named in honor of Kirkman’s dad.

How would a single slow-moving zombie catch a deer? Maybe the deer was already sick or dead, and the zombie just found it. We saw last issue that zombies will eat horses. Do they turn into horse zombies? Apparently not. If zombie plague was transmissible to other animals, especially pests like mosquitos, all life on Earth would soon be over.



There’s no wilderness campsite within walking distance of the part of Atlanta that has skyscrapers. Rather, suburbs sprawl out in every direction for many miles since Atlanta abuts neither an ocean nor a mountain. Good thing Rick ran into the one guy in Atlanta who was staying at the camp where his family now lives! It must be Providence at work.

Kirkman treats Atlanta as if it were laid out on a grid like Manhattan. There is no “38th Street.” Most streets in Atlanta only run for a few blocks before terminating or changing direction due to hills, so people don’t think in terms of “blocks” much, and streets generally have names instead of numbers.

James Sime from the Isotope Comics store in San Francisco is one of the zombies attacking here. He’s a long way from Cali! He also has appeared in Kirkman’s series invincible as the villain flunkie Isotope. I bet there lots of inside jokes among the zombie faces in this series.


Apparently one of the characters is based on Maria Shriver. Is it Lori Grimes?



Glenn’s T-shirt is from Vancouver-based hip hop group Swollen Members.

It seems likely to me that many people would have been trying to get somewhere in their cars and would end up leaving them abandoned on the road, making it difficult for subsequent people to use every road.



It's 180 miles from Nashville to Knoxville. I was thinking how someone in Kentucky would go to Atlanta (1) through Nashville, (2) through Knoxville, (3) on state roads between the two, or (4) cross-country on foot or horse. All those routes will tend to converge on Chattanooga.


Rereading, I see that in the comic book, Rick is going to Atlanta because Lori's parents were there, so he hopes Lori might be there too. There's no thought of visiting the CDC. Kirkman was staunch in his insistence that there would be neither an explanation nor a cure for the zombie plague in the comic book.

The video game "The Last of Us" deals with the notion of a zombie cure in a very interesting way.

I think a full-on panic situation would have many trying to avoid getting trapped on a freeway, and take the surface streets, so I could see business and residential areas blocked off with abandoned cars. YMMV.



I see. Kirkman went overboard with his reaction to the TV /CDC episode. Its as if he never wanted to be questioned or even theorize about the how and why of the zombie virus, when that--as mentioned yesterday--is exactly how people would think in a global zombie apocalypse. He had nothing to worry about, since the TV episode's suicidal Dr. Jenner allowed himself to die in the CDC's protective mode explosion, so any chance for a cure died with the character, and next to no one has ever mentioned seeking a cure since (note Eugene was a liar and Woodbury's Milton was less than a quack).



Hmm...



Initially, I thought Carl getting a gun would lead to a pivotal moment for the character and comic, but shooting Shane was not expected.



To be honest, he used zombies as a theme/gimmick, but if the aim was to explore man's inhumanity to fellow man, any post-apocalyptic plot device would have worked, as seen in movies such as Five (1951), The World, the Flesh and the Devil (1959), and obviously, the original Night of the Living Dead.



...and the change from Carl to Rick actually killing Shane was necessary, not only to place the burden on Rick, who would then become estranged from Lori (for the reminder of her time on the series), but it prevented Carl from seeming too ruthless early on. Yes, he was protecting his father, but the outright killing of another would change him from any semblance of a child.

#13-18 “Safety Behind Bars” (October 2004-April 2005)




New Characters: Dexter, Axel, Andrew, and Thomas are felons.

The Story: Tyreese and Rick clear dozens of zombies from the prison yard easily. Then several dozen more swarm the tired men from inside a nearby building. Andrea, now established as the group’s best sniper, runs for bullets to help them thin the herd with firepower.



Exploring the prison interior, Tyreese and Rick encounter four felons living like relative kings in the hospital cafeteria. Two of them admit to violent histories, but none of them seem hostile – more like suspicious of strangers. Rick recognizes the fenced prison yard as a secure location for a farm, but he needs a farmer. He and Dale return to Hershel’s farm, where the Greene family is getting tired of zombie attacks and agrees to relocate to Rick’s new base. Hershel apologizes for his previous actions.



Foolish young lovers Chris and Julie make a sex/suicide pact, but only Julie ends up dead; it’s harder than they thought for two people to shoot each other simultaneously. This is when our heroes discover that dead people turn to zombies even if they haven’t been bitten by a zombie themselves. Chris shoots zombie Julie a second time, and in his rage Tyreese throttles Chris to death for shooting Tyreese's daughter. Rick tells everybody else that Julie killed Chris.



Rick takes a motorcycle all the way back to Atlanta just so he can dig up zombie Shane and kill him the second time. Rick tells himself it’s to put a friend out of his misery. But his refusal to re-bury Shane’s zombie corpse tells us it’s really an act of vengeance for Shane seducing and impregnating Lori.



Back at the prison, Glenn and Maggie have sex in a barber chair and give each other haircuts, so now it’s easier to distinguish them from other characters. Later Hershel finds his young twin daughters Rachel and Susie in the barbershop, but instead of a haircut, they’ve been completely decapitated. Kirkman and Adlard don’t spare us any gory details.



Biker felon Axel deliberately walks in on Lori and Carol in the shower, pretending it was an accident. Axel counsels Andrew that his “gay for prison” boyfriend Dexter is unlikely to make himself available now that women are around. Dexter has a history of violence – but is he a child murderer? How about Axel the Peeping Tom?



In grief over Julie’s death and guilt over Chris’ death, Tyreese wades heedlessly into a zombie horde in the prison gymnasium and must be left behind. He’s presumed dead, but the following issue it turns out he prevailed without a scratch. It's Kirkman's first fake cliffhanger.



The death of his wife Donna has unhinged Allen as well. He sits around giving lectures to his young sons Billy and Ben about their impending deaths.



In Rick’s absence, Lori asserts herself, locking up Dexter at gunpoint. But the quiet "accountant" Thomas reveals himself as the actual murderer when he tries to kill Andrea in the laundry. She flees to the prison yard with an amputated left earlobe and a deep cut to her cheek, and Rick pummels Thomas within an inch of his life, breaking his own fingers in the process.



Rick organizes Thomas’ lynching, which repulses hormonal Lori at first. But before sentence is carried out, Patricia foolishly sets Thomas free. He attacks her and is gunned down by Maggie Greene, partly in vengeance for the murder of Maggie’s sisters.



Dexter and Andrew have lost all trust in Rick’s group. With Patricia in tow, they raid the prison armory and demand at gunpoint that Rick and his friends vacate the prison. It’s our first cliffhanger ending to an arc!



Lettercols: Kirkman confesses that he intended for this issue to end with Thomas getting hung instead of shot, and for Dexter to grab the guns and run rather than attempt to force Rick’s group to run. Indeed, the cover of #18 shows Thomas’ lynching, which is not how the story finally unfolded. Finally the editorial comments in the lettercol are in boldface to distinguish them from the letters. This feature comes and goes for several issues before returning for good, and thankfully so.

Cheat Sheet: This issue also contains a three page Dramatis Personae section to help new readers keep track of all the characters. It even includes folks like Jim and Shane who exited the series early.



My Two Cents: What’s a horror story without a serial killer? This arc seems particularly heavy on plot and action. Rick’s colony gets as high as 23 members before the deaths of Chris, Julie, Thomas, Susie, and Rachel thin their numbers. Tyreese gets the series’ first “not dead yet” award. With this many folks running around, the story structure tends toward a series of one page vignettes with different combinations of characters, much like a soap opera.

Speaking of soap opera, Kirkman had originally plotted for Rick and Lori to break up in issue #18 after Rick pummels Thomas. But when it came time to script the scene, the argument turned into a reconciliation scene instead.



“A couple sneaks off and have sex” continues to be one of the most common character moments; so far none of the trysts have ended with a cliché zombie attack, though we'll see several whose participants are dead soon after nonetheless. Mostly, characters are acting realistically, except for a titillating moment when Carol, grieving Tyreese’s supposed death, tries to make out with Lori. This is a thing that happens in movies, but it doesn’t ring true. Kirkman does spin this out into a continuing plot thread though.



The story of Carl and Sophie is still bubbling in the background. The kids even get all huggy when frightened by Rick’s display of rage toward Thomas. Carl pretends not to like a kiss from Sophia.