Review: The Walking Dead; Comic vs. Show
By Dania Sonin
December 15, 2010
For writers, it’s never enough to just ask the question, “What would you do if...?” No. We have to build up a person just to destroy them. We have to make them loveable, personable, justified, sincere. We make them everything we think a person ought to be then take them by the throat and dangle them over the cliff. We let them sit out in the rain – let them rot and ripen into monsters who want nothing more than to survive – family and friends be damned. We see what they do when. We watch the outcomes and delight in their pain.
Readers similarly love to watch us torture our fictitious vessels and, for awhile now, one of the most popular ways has been through post-apocalyptic dystopias rife with supernatural dangers. We’re all very used to the tropes involved in just about every zombie movie ever made. A decent, suburban person must ignore his or her fight or flight response and become a hero and a leader in order to save the select few who make it long enough to build at least some sort of stronghold. We watch them fight off a swarm and make it to relative safety. They smile and hug, we feel happy that they made it, and the credits roll.
Robert Kirkman, however, wanted to explore the next chapter. He sought to answer an entirely different question: what now? Since 2003, he’s been writing The Walking Dead, a comic book series centred around Rick Grimes and his family as they attempt to make sense of life after a zombie apocalypse. In 2010, AMC decided to go ahead and produce a television series based on the comic. The first season, six episodes long, is meant to encompass the first volume of the comic series. I found out about both the comic and the show at the same time, and while waiting for the premiere, I decided it’d be a good idea to immerse myself in Grimes’ world and find out what I was in for.
The comic delighted me absolutely. Rick Grimes fit the old trope pretty well at first, but really, the characters were nothing special – by which I mean there were no real heroes, no clear winners or losers. They were all people who’d made mistakes and thus avoided being clustered into big cities where the attacks hit hardest. They were relatable without being forced, and, in many ways, very similar to one another, having come from a similar part of the United States. I’d be remiss if I were to spoil the first volume, but I can say that it has one of the most honest, heart-wrenching and deeply disturbing endings of the first compendium. The series itself is a must-read for those who love psychology, character development, dystopias, and zombies. I put zombies last on purpose because Kirkman himself states in a foreword to the first volume that he means this to be an exploration of human nature under crisis. His story is meant to be an on-going one because he believes that, if some great zombie cataclysm were to happen, the first step would be survival and the next step would be rebuilding some semblance of society and that would take much longer than an hour and a half to convey.
The television series, though, takes a different approach right off the bat. It opens with Rick Grimes searching among abandoned, bloodied cars for whatever gasoline he can find. He hears a scuffling behind him, and we see pale feet taking slow steps behind a car. “Little girl,” he calls, and we see from behind, that a small blonde girl is walking towards him holding a teddy bear. The camera pans up and around, and of course, her mouth is bloody, her eyes are dull, and she looks hungry. He shoots her in the head and the opening sequence rolls. The Walking Dead has begun.
This sets the tone for the rest of the first season, and while it’s an entertaining show, there are many who feel that it lacks the quality that sets the comic book apart from other zombie stories. The Walking Dead is supposed to have a literary feel, more mature than gory monsters and cheap scares, similar to World War Z. The show goes for every scare it can and quickly falls into cliché, tacky, zombie movie territory. By the second episode, the writers have already introduced a veritable cornucopia of characters of every race and tax bracket. There’s no camaraderie, no chemistry, and constant tension. They all become trapped at the top of a department building of some sort and decide that a truck is their best bet. Suddenly the show feels like a low-budget interpretation of Dawn of the Dead and it’s easy to see that half the people they’ve added are only there to provide the audience with a gruesome death scene.
This irks me because the way Kirkman sets up his series, we are only slowly introduced to death. Even killing the zombies is difficult for some of his characters, and losing friends sends them over the edge. He builds and builds, though, making death less and less relevant until you realise you don’t even really care who just died or what they left behind. You become Rick’s foil and start to understand that when death becomes a part of life, it almost becomes entertainment. But this is a revelation, meant exactly to contradict current horror movie doctrine. Kirkman does a really great job of suspending excitement and entertainment in his comics so that it isn’t just spectacle. The show drives right into spectacle and sets off a case of fireworks. If you doubt me at all, let’s just say, for some reason, there’s an explosion in the first season that’s big enough to level half a city block.
Hardcore zombie fans, hardcore AMC fans, and hardcore The Walking Dead fans so far have seemed to love the series. But the best reviews I’ve heard have been from people who never even knew there was a comic to be adapted. So, my advice would be that if you’ve already read the comic, watch the series with two caveats in mind: “adapted from” and “based on” can be very liberally interpreted, and the entire writing staff has been fired even though the series has been renewed for a second season. So, at least the ones making it know they’ve messed it up already and are trying to make it right. If you haven’t read the series, watch the show first, but then definitely pick up the books because they are very much worth the read. Both are worth the time, but probably should be looked at as related, but ultimately different, things. And either way, who can ever say no to zombies?
UPDATE Dec. 22nd: When this article was originally written, rumours abounded that the writing staff of The Walking Dead had been all fired by showrunner Frank Darabont. Since then, those rumours have been refuted. An article all about it can be found at TV Squad here.