Final Thoughts on the Walking Dead Comic (Compendium 1)

I’ve come to the conclusion that The Walking Dead comic series is written exclusively for the purpose of making the characters as miserable as possible while keeping the audience on the hook about what’s going to happen next.  Well, I, for one, am not buying into it anymore.  Yep, I’m done.  I can’t take it anymore.  Jude the Obscure was less depressing than this (also funnier).  No more Walking Dead comic for me.

Spoilers follow.

I understand perfectly that in an ongoing story about a catastrophic zombie outbreak (someone should write a story about a zombie outbreak that’s contained quickly and cleanly with minimal loss of life, if only to lampoon the prevalence of zombie-related tropes in today’s pop culture) people must die, and there will inevitably be people dying who the audience has gotten attached to.  Character deaths actually don’t bother me that much, so I don’t have any complaints over Tyreese, or Axel, or Patricia, or Billy, or Hershel, or Lori, or even baby Judith dying violently during the Governor’s attack on the prison.

What I do have a complaint about is characters who are just written to be infuriating.

“Oh God, Carol! Why were you so poorly written?” (Image credit: walkingdead.wikia.com)

Like Carol.

On the show, Carol is one of my favorite characters.  She’s an abused woman who’s also lost her daughter (in perhaps the most traumatic way possible), and despite her hardships, she remains a wonderful character who helps hold together a lot of the other characters who are suffering through their own traumas.

In the comic, she’s an abused woman who has some very serious mental health issues who is constantly looking for someone to enter a romantic relationship with.  This in and of itself isn’t necessarily bad or unrealistic, but when Carol reaches the point where she throws herself at both Rick and Lori and suggests that they participate in some weird form of polygamy strikes me as instability for the sake of having a mentally unstable character.  I’m having difficulty putting my finger on what it is about the way Carol’s written that irks me so much, but I just despise her in the comics.  Maybe because I like TV!Carol so much, the drastically different direction she goes in the comics is pushing my fan rage button.  Maybe I hate seeing someone written as having mental illness just for the sake of having a character who’s ostracized by everyone else and can have a pitiful death (Carol’s suicide by zombie irks me mostly because I just don’t get where it came from; I understand she’s supposed to have lost hope at that point, but what triggered it?).

She’s a difficult character to deal with, partially because I know it’s really hard to treat mental illness with sensitivity in writing, and partially because she strikes me as filling Donna’s role from the first few chapters as the woman that everyone pities but no one really likes because she’s just not living in the same reality as them.

Conversely, Michonne’s weird multiple personality thing (which I could do without, honestly; I like her better on the show where she’s just a very cautious survivalist who’s learning how to trust other survivors) is done pretty well, and doesn’t get reflected as a signifier of a weak character who should be pitied by the readers.  We’re supposed to think she’s crazy, but crazy in a way that’s threatening (which, honestly, is not that much better than crazy in a way that’s pitiful).

Maybe what I’m trying to get at is that I think Kirkman’s kind of clumsy with how he portrays women and people with mental illness.

Also, I get the idea that we’re going for making Rick as miserable as possible, but you know, at some point you have to say, “This character has been through enough.  I’m just going to kill him off and move on to someone else.”  It might be jarring for the readers to lose the main character, but I’m okay with that.  Rick’s suffered enough, and from what I hear he just keeps on suffering for a good long while (also, for what it’s worth, I find it incredibly weird to see so many left-handed people in relation to this series, especially when most of them are forced to be left-handed by… um… circumstances; even as a lefty, depictions of left-handers just look wrong).

So yeah, I’m done.  Unless someone wants to lend me Compendium 2, which I would totally read like right now.

What the Heck, Walking Dead Comic? (Also, Yay, Walking Dead Show!)

I’ve been on a little bit of a zombie kick as of late (maybe because Halloween–Happy Halloween everyone!), mostly because of all my opportunities to catch up on Walking Dead stuff.

It’s been really fantastic.  I finished Season 3, and I definitely think the show is much improved over Season 2.  The horrific things felt pretty pitch perfect to me, and there were actually plenty of hope spots throughout this season’s narrative.  Andrea’s arc in particular strikes me as especially poignant (I’m going to discuss spoilers from here on, so come back later if you haven’t seen Season 3 and care not to know what happens in advance) with her back-and-forth between Woodbury and the main group trying to prevent a war.  In the finale, when she’s sitting in the torture room talking with Milton (I think she’s talking with Milton; I’m slightly fuzzy on details at the moment) she explains that she could have prevented all the death if she had just killed the Governor when she had the opportunity.  I think that it’s supposed to be ironic, implying that all the killing that’s happened since that point is Andrea’s fault (driven home by the fact that the Governor guns down his own people in the finale right around the same time if my memory’s not faulty), but I really couldn’t bring myself to judge Andrea harshly.

See, like I’ve mentioned previously, The Walking Dead is a series that’s mostly concerned with the questions of how we maintain our humanity (an interesting concept in itself, since depending on your worldview, humanity’s a quality that’s either what makes us essentially dignified creatures or base ones) when stripped of all the modern comforts and advantages that allow us to think about things beyond basic survival.  It’s kind of like asking if it’s possible for people to even aspire towards higher goals on Maslow’s hierarchy of needs while they’re constantly bombarded with threats to basic safety (as a side note, I think this upending of the theoretical hierarchy is a core concept in ideologies of sacrifice, like Christianity).

English: Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. Resized, renamed, and cropped version of File:Mazlow’s Hierarchy of Needs.svg. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Anyway, getting back to Andrea, I think that it’s supremely noble of her to try so hard to find a bloodless solution to a problem that involves a lot of desperate people (and one very psychologically disturbed one).  A pragmatic view would call her naive, and I can see that; the Governor’s death early on would have prevented a lot of pain and death for innocent people.  Still, Andrea’s remarkable because she’s a character who actually sees value in the Governor (who, for all his sadism, I find somewhat sympathetic, if only because it’s clear that he’s been slowly going insane due to the stress of his situation–keep in mind, of course, that he’s still very much a villain, since his introductory episode shows him killing a group of ragged soldiers in order to take their supplies rather than trying to incorporate them into his township).  As a viewer, I kept hoping that the Governor would get offed, and I’ll admit I was disappointed that he got away at the end of the season.  As a Christian (yeah, I’m pulling out the C-card; by the way, for a really thoughtful expression of what I find admirable in Andrea’s attempts to stop the fighting, read Shane Claiborne’s response to a recent article that Mark Driscoll posted about Christian pacifism), I wanted to see him redeemed, even after all the awful things he did.  Merle got his redemption in this season, after a really good run as a villain, so I’m hoping to see something similar in the Governor (although given the trajectory of his character, I doubt the writers would do anything so dramatic, if only because I think it’d be immensely difficult to get most of the audience to sympathize with him again) down the road.

Anyhow, that’s enough about the show (I’ve barely scratched the surface of what I liked about this season), especially since this post was (if the title is anything to go by) supposed to be about my frustration with the Walking Dead comic.

I’m not sure where to start in cataloging what irks me about the comic, just because there’s so much.  A lot of characters that I love in the show are so difficult to read in the comic, partly because they’re so remarkably different from how they’ve developed on the show, and partly because the comic takes a much more cynical view of the series’s central question.  The show, for all its darkness, includes moments of hope, like Season 3’s ending where Rick chooses to invite the survivors of Woodbury to join his group in the prison (which he seems to emphasize to Carl is the right thing to do, after Carl shot a boy from Woodbury who had been surrendering to him).  I’ve not finished reading the Woodbury arc in the comic yet (I honestly don’t even know if it gets wrapped up in the first compendium) but I seriously doubt that it’s going to end with that kind of reconciliation.  Also, where I have some real sympathy for the Governor in the show, the same character in the comic just makes me feel sick.  He’s even more sadistic without any of the apparent charisma, and he continues to do things that are just more and more horrific in comparison to his counterpart on the show.  The two versions share the back story of the zombified daughter that he keeps in his apartment, but where it’s sadly tragic in the show, it’s just pathetic in the comic (perhaps it’s because the Governor’s just so flip about feeding Penny body parts from people he’s captured).

Anyhow, that’s enough ranting for now.  Both versions of this series are incredibly compelling, but I definitely prefer one over the other.

Yay, Walking Dead Comic!

So, after yesterday’s post about being excited that The Walking Dead Season 3 is now on Netflix (by the way, here’s a really fascinating article about the effects of Netflix as a conduit for our culturally significant television programming) I sat down to not watch The Walking Dead, but to start reading the comic series (a friend of Rachael’s has loaned us the omnibus with the first 48 issues, and I am ready to devour it whole).

I’ve read through the first chapter, which ends just after the group decides it’s time to relocate their camp away from Atlanta.  It’s very different from the show in a lot of ways (this is only cosmetic, but Rick’s a sandy-haired sheriff from Kentucky), and very similar in others (Amy still bites it during the zombie attack on the camp, and Jim gets infected and left behind following the same).  I know that things veer off in a very different direction from the television series, so I’m looking forward to seeing how all this post-apocalyptic chaos turns out.

The Walking Dead #1. Art by Tony Moore. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

On a side note, considering that this story takes place after the fall of modern civilization, does it really belong in the apocalyptic genre?  I mean, the purpose of apocalyptic literature is to help shed light on the meaning of life as we know it by giving us an imagined ending for it (in many ways the ending of things is what helps us figure out what their ultimate significance is).  The Walking Dead imagines that life as we know it ends with a zombie plague that destroys civilization and leaves the few survivors scrambling to figure out the meaning of their own new life-as-they-know-it.  Maybe this should be a separate blog post of its own.

Anyway, I’ve read the first chapter, which was quite good in a lot of ways (the dynamic between Rick and Shane was one of my favorite parts of the first two seasons of the show, and I really enjoyed getting to revisit that relationship) and not as good in others (I didn’t think it was possible, but I think the comic has even more problems with its female characters than the show does).

I’m really enjoying the art (mostly because I can now see where the game took cues from for its art style), which is really refreshing after all the superhero comics I’m accustomed to reading.  Even though horrific things keep happening on panel, the semi-realistic style of the characters and the simple grayscale palette are kind of soothing in comparison.

Of course, (incoming feminist rant) I’m not sure which is more problematic: unrealistically proportioned depictions of women in spine-breaking poses, or female characters who look like they really exist, but who are just poorly written.  I mean, on the one hand we have the reveling in the fact that a fictional character is, at its base, an object designed for human manipulation and consumption, and on the other hand we have characters who are drawn to hide that fact, but whose actions and dialogue suggest a troubling view of gender dynamics.  If I have to pick, I’ll probably say I find the second option more problematic, because it involves attempts at making characters that appear more realistic, but have manufactured personalities that support the dominant social narrative of patriarchy.

It comes down to these two characters and laundry, really.  See, there’s Lori in all of her irritating glory (I’ve not read past chapter 1 yet, so I don’t think I’ve been fully exposed to all the headbanging frustrations she presents for fans of the comics) and then there’s Donna, who I honestly can’t remember from Season 1 of the show (if she was a character that transferred over, I don’t recall her being written the way she is here, and I certainly don’t think she made it past the incident at the CDC).  Donna is a character who fulfills the straw feminist trope in the laundry scene; she complains that washing clothes is something that everyone should take turns doing instead of being foisted off on the women while the men go hunt, and Lori tells her that she’s complaining about insignificant things because its a rational division of labor.

Except it’s not.  Washing clothes by hand is unskilled work (though Lori makes a big deal about how Rick couldn’t wash clothes with a machine) while hunting is.  In this situation, doing laundry is a luxury while hunting is something essential because the group needs to eat.  Logically speaking, in a world where there’s danger pretty much everywhere and the guys are always putting themselves in harm’s way by doing dangerous things like hunting and scavenging for supplies, it follows that everyone should be learning how to hunt.  Donna makes an excellent point here, but Lori shuts her down as the queen bee that I’m so familiar with from Season 2 of the show.

Of course, despite this strong point, which here is cast as Donna being unnecessarily uppity because of feminism, she later gets jammed into the role of being unnecessarily uppity because of religion.  Donna frequently scoffs and makes snide comments about the fact that Amy and Andrea are sleeping in Dale’s trailer, which she apparently takes issue with because she has a rather conservative evangelical background.  That would be fine, except then it doesn’t make sense for her to also have a strong aversion to traditional gender roles in the presence of the camp’s other women.  By the way, I’m not saying it’s impossible for a woman to be a strong feminist while also having a strong evangelical Christian worldview, but because both things are presented as negative traits in Donna, I think their application to the same character indicates they serve the purpose of characterizing her as a dour nag.  I doubt that Robert Kirkman put much thought into how these apparently disparate character traits should logically fit together (either as conflicting parts of a more fleshed out character or as things that are both core to the character’s identity and have a sort of equilibrium established between them).

Okay, I’m letting go of the rant now.

I suppose at this rate I should aim for a hat trick and write a post about the Walking Dead video game.  Maybe someday.

Yay, New Walking Dead Episodes!

And because I’m a total anti-hipster, I’m talking about Season 3, folks.  I’m going to watch it now that it’s not cool anymore with Season 4 on the way.  Because that’s how I roll.

Seriously though, I like The Walking Dead, but I’ve not seen any of Season 3 because, once again, Rachael and I do not have cable.  We watch our shows after all the water cooler buzz has faded and the internet is no longer enamored with them.  After all, somebody has to get excited about those Netflix notices letting you know that the last season of a show that’s about to start airing its new season, and if not us, then who?

The Walking Dead (season 2) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

So in a recent conversation with a coworker who likes to boast that he has no internet at his home, we were discussing how excited we were about new Walking Dead.  A lot of the kids at school really like it because it’s a gory zombie killfest, and also it’s largely about Rick Grimes showing what it means to be a Real Man(tm).  I enjoy it for the philosophical exploration of what significance our trappings of civilization have to our identity as human beings, but the gore and zombies are fun too.  Anyway, I was telling my coworker that I was looking forward to seeing Season 3, and he gave me kind of a ‘meh’ reaction.  I was surprised by this, because everyone else who’s seen Season 3 tells me that it was a great improvement over Season 2 in terms of character development.

The Walking Dead has kind of a problem with how it writes its female characters, especially Lori.

She’s pretty much the Lady Macbeth of Post-Apocolyptia (formerly rural Georgia) with her bizarre machinations to make Rick do things he’s not morally comfortable with while at the same time being wishy-washy about the fact that she started a relationship with her husband’s best friend when she thought he was dead (yeah, that’s awkward, but it seems like the kind of thing that’s best aired out early, rather than sitting on it until the animosity between the two men reaches a point where they go into the wilderness alone with the intention of killing each other).  She’s just frustrating in a lot of ways, and many of them have nothing to do with the fact that the series is set in Georgia where a form of gender complementarianism is a social norm (if that were the case, then I’d be happy to see some more in-depth exploration of gender roles on the show, especially as it relates to the utter collapse of civilization; alas, the women, for the most part, act like stereotypically gendered women, and the men act like the characters who do all the exciting stuff).

Setting aside problematic characters, I still really enjoy this show (almost as much as I enjoyed the game; if you like the show and you enjoy games in a similar vein to old point-and-click adventures, then you should definitely play the Walking Dead game).  Horror-based television shows are hard to pull off (especially long-running ones) because one of the big conventions of horror is that you have to let horrible things happen to your characters (the kind of things that might make them useless as further actors within your story, in fact).  This problem creates a serious roadblock for any show that wants to rely on having a steady core cast while still maintaining a real suspense over whether everyone will survive to the next episode.  Nonetheless, The Walking Dead pulls this off rather well.  Even though a significant (sympathetic) character only seems to die about once per season (by my reckoning; remember that I haven’t seen Season 3 yet) I still feel worried that everyone’s really in danger.  Of course, when you write a show where you’re not afraid to zombify child characters that the audience is attached to, I suppose it’s not that hard to make it feel like no one’s really safe (although the fact that Rick keeps winding up on the cover of each season’s teaser poster suggests that he’s got some kind of super plot armor–not necessarily a bad thing, but he also seems like the one who gets into the most trouble too).

So anyway, I’m looking forward to watching some more zombie action.  Maybe I should go do that now instead of working on this blog post, in fact…