Chris Cole

I’ve been poring over copies of a great survival horror comic ‘The Walking Dead‘ over the last month or so. Amazing stuff — it’s taken a bit to get the collected copies – I’m on number 7 out of 8 (each collects six or so of the original comics). Can’t wait to read the last volume.

It’s a story about pretty much the end of the world — and I know shockingly, the zombie apocalypse. Amazing art, ink and of course storyline. It’s also all black and white – which somehow just adds to the effect.

“It begins with Rick, a dedicated cop, waking from a coma in a hospital. There are no orderlies, no nurses, no doctors and no loved ones to be found. Though he was comatose from a shotgun blast to the chest, Rick is able to walk. He probably wishes he hadn’t, as he finds the hospital filled with the dead — and some of those dead are still walking around.

There are no answers as to how or why the outbreak began, but the dead are walking among us and they’re real hungry. Rick escapes Kentucky and heads towards Atlanta, hoping that his wife and son managed to escape to a larger city. What he discovers is that the cities are overrun with zombies, that just about everyone who decided to take refuge in the big metropolises of the US ended up as zombie fodder. ” <from Comics IGN>

The starkness of the art and storyline are refreshing — where would you go when the world ends? It’s a kind of search for home… But the longer you’re anywhere, the walking dead start to come and gather. It’s disconcerting to watch the characters start to bend and finally shear off — coming unglued under the stress.