The Walking Dead – Comic and TV (probably light spoilers, I try to keep it clean)

I am a huge fan of The Walking Dead comic book. In the comic world it is legendary for quite a few things, mostly meta. The joke is, “You can open a comic book store and keep it running just off Walking Dead sales.” Maybe closer to true in the 00s and into the 10s, not sure about now. I know, as Sunday Guy at Guapo, good sale days for me always included someone coming in and buying 3-4 trades of TWD.

Robert Kirkman is a true American success story. Worked hard, did some stuff, and produced first few issues of The Walking Dead in his little apartment in Kentucky in 2003, yadda yadda. Now he’s a media mogul. Comics, TV, movies, novels… he’s got his fingers in it all. Image gave him a seat at the big boy table and then gave him his own imprint Skybound.

The Walking Dead trade paper backs have, consistently, been best sellers at comic retailers. I have not looked it up in the past 2 years or so but it still chugging along. I do always hear it is the most reprinted comic book out there.

Though I have not made a life-changing amount of money my own TWD sales (I’ve sold my collection up to issue 100) has made me a good amount of money. Doing the math that investment was better than gold. I started with issue #21 and bought the monthlies faithfully up to today (issue #156). 23-100 at $1.99 each (discounted due to my box subscriptions) is 68 issues for $135. Over the past 2 years I’ve sold them for over $800. I’ve then turned around and replaced them with hard covers for my own library. That’s close to $12 an issue, pretty good growth from $2. I wish I could do that with more adult investments.*
*This has topped out though. TWD comics has gained as much as it will in my opinion.

On top of all that it’s the only comic I read monthly, other titles I let build up so I have a few issues to read at a time. TWD? Nope. I buy it, I rush home, I pour a glass of milk, I read the damn thing.

What I like about the comic book story-wise:
1) Hit or miss, Kirkman is pretty calculated with his story. He considers audience emotions and psychology. He’ll lead along a trope and then flip it.
2) Pacing. Some say it got slow in some arches and I agree. It’s always come back though. 3 issues cover a day, then we get a 3 month time jump, yadda yadda.

3) Development – communities and such. Early on we were sweating a bottle of fresh water. Now are sweating making sure the trade route between the communities is clear and whether both boats are capable of fishing or trade.

4) Our protagonists, we find out later, have been through the worst. By the time they are introduced to Alexandria they find out they are bad-asses and very capable. By the time the war is over they are legendary. People talk about them behind their backs in a mythical way. Urban Legends are born around them.

5) All the bad-assery aside there are still many threats to their safety (and now whole communities rely on them) and plenty of interpersonal drama and problems. Plenty of story to go.

The Walking Dead TV on AMC, I have different feelings for.

I like how a comic book could be adapted for TV and it was good writing and a good show. Apparently and incredibly popular show. A really popular show about zombies and survivors as a matter of fact, things that I enjoy very much. Like the Avengers movies there are scenes in TWD-TV that I saw in TWD-Comic that brought tears to my eyes as it was a favorite panel brought to life on screen. I’ve had an excellent time watching TWD on my fall and winter Sunday nights. I even have a ritual kind of like when I read the comic – I have a cigarette and pour a glass of water. Sometimes I will have candy while watching but I’ve been dumping that habit. Cigarette and water though – seems fitting.

I advocate for the show when people say things like, “They always run into some bad survivor group… they never get a stable home… they never meet new “good” people…” and I say that these things will happen. And then they do. They follow the comic storyline with some differences for rating affect (Daryl).

Watching the most recent episode (the big Who Did Negan Kill season opener) I really began to turn my opinion on the show. Like Game of Thrones I felt tedium and boredom creep in. It did not help that last season ended with the Who Did Negan Kill cliff-hanger. I want to unpack that a bit here:

So, in February, after a big build-up on meeting Negan and already going through this in the comic… and a first half of a season that was useless anyways (and I recommend people skip the first half of season 6 all the time, and people have, and people have thanked me) we end up with the story-changing scene of our protagonists on their knees and the “big kill” where Negan kills a very popular character in gruesome detail. We see Negan swing and even react when he hits someone with Lucille and <end scene>.

We then go through 8 months of wondering who that was.

Come last Sunday we find out who it was. That gory scene was NOT MY PROBLEM at all. I’m not that freaked out by violence and gore. My problem was was that a whole 1 hour episode was built around that. Scene after scene of Negan explaining to Rick that Rick is now his man. Negan breaking down Rick and then turning on the rest of Team Rick. Rick and Team Rick all crying, bleeding, and being sad. Now, I get it, what was happening was sad and horrifying. I got that LAST YEAR when we showed it for 30 minutes. 10 minutes in to this new episode (and we have not yet seen who got killed BTW) we are still being shown how scared and sad Rick and everyone was. I was solid on that. 60 minutes in I was bored and did not care anymore as we got zero forward progression. Just sadness and misery.

On top of all that it felt a bit pandering, a little too engineered and not organic at all. Like a new bar opening and billing itself as a dive bar. The Walking Dead just spent 8 months showing me 90 minutes of misery and sadness. As an ex-friend once said, “They are shitting in your brain.”

Unlike many others though I will not say “I am done…”.  I have said that with Game of Thrones and other shows but I never make a big production of it. I just quit watching and if asked I answer honestly. I’ve never identified as an advocate of those shows though and TWD is part of my identity and fandom. I am not the targeted TV audience nor have I ever been. I am now seeing the comic audience and TV audience, though with some cross-over, are not the same. I’m going to keep going but maybe not the event TV it was for me. Maybe I’ll catch up later when I can marathon (and fast forward) through hours of the series.

The comic book is awesome though so any loss is not a sting. I got the original still. The time jump? Carl being all grown up and getting chicks. Negan a good guy? People saying, “I heard Rick and Andrea beat a gang of cannibals to death with Rick’s chopped off hand!”. Psychological evolution in a zombie – post apocalyptic world and whole sociological orders based off that.