The Walking Dead: Compendium One
Written by Robert Kirkman
This first large compendium of Walking Dead volumes covers a great deal of time in the Walking Dead universe. The comic as a whole has reached its 100th issue, and this printing includes issues #1 – #48. I think it’s important to note that zombie fiction is fundamentally end of the world fiction, and I don’t think it has ever been done with a positive spin on the downfall of humanity and people’s ability to deal with death and mortality well. If anything, this stems from the really basic ideas that make zombies so appealing, they take all of that inherent and natural xenophobia that exists within us, and they give us an endless body of things that are unlike us that it is okay to hate and be afraid of.
Given that natural meaning to zombies, it makes a lot of sense that people who write fiction in these worlds always write characters that are constantly at odds or against each other. This can also be credited to the need for conflict to drive a story, and zombies being a constant external threat with thin motive and limited dramatic force, it becomes almost essential to make that driving dramatic core of a story work between the characters inside of it. If you really think about it, zombies are more like a destructive force of nature than characters, they have the same limited affect as a tidal wave or a poison gas leak. They become background for a real story. A lot of books and movies and other mediums tend to forget this and try to focus on the action and the conflict with the zombies, but Robert Kirkman has brilliantly created this wonderful series that never forgets that it’s about how people interact with each other in this newly claustrophobic universe.
But with all that said, it’s very important to note for someone who might be considering reading this that it is a depressing read. It addresses suicide, rape, murder, loss, and deep personal pain in every conceivable scenario. The series has a lot of high points for the characters where people have managed to set up reservations against the zombie horde, but I will tell you now that this compendium does not end on a high note. Even for people who are able to really enjoy a well told story with a sad ending, it is important to know that this is a different sort of animal. On this journey of discovering the nature of a new world, it is a world of constant suffering and solitude. The author almost casually kills off great characters, and you feel their loss, and you’re supposed to feel it. And more importantly, you even feel it when you start to stop feeling loss when they die. You start to share in the numbness of a mad world with the survivors.
The dialog is engrossing and captivating. The characters have real issues to talk about and fears to express. Their hopes and dreams are meaningful, and it makes them very endearing, even when you tend to hate them when they are actually given things to say. When they step out from the horde of dangerous humans, hungry, violent, aggressively desperate to survive, they are humanized just enough to give you a glimpse at what makes them such a monstrous and terrible enemy. They are given just enough humanization to give relief to the distinction between the feelings you have for them and for the zombies, and to highlight the underlying ideas that make the zombies so terrible. The visual style rich and detailed and emotive making it very appealing. It might turn off some to know that while the covers are beautifully colored, the graphic novel is mostly gray-scale. I find it to be an appealing way to contextualize the bleakness of the setting, and it works really well. If you are like me, then you may very well find yourself so completely engrossed in the dialog and the movement of what is happening and the overall narrative that you don’t even notice anymore.
This is an amazing series, and this is only most of the first half of what is available to read so far, and every bit of it is worth reading. Given what I’ve said here, maybe you might not like this type of story, but it is very good. It is, I feel, some of the best this genre of stories has to offer, if not the very best. I recommend it to anyone at all who can handle the things that make it terrifying and bleak. This is a great story to talk about and discuss, because like all truly great fiction it is full of ideas, not just a story. And ideas are infectious.
the dangling colloquy 