Clare L. Deming

I picked this book up at New York Comic-Con last year and just had a chance to sit down to read it recently (so much to read, so little time). I had thought I was coming to this fresh, not having watched the show, and only being peripherally aware of it. However, the story at the outset seemed very familiar.

Rick is a police officer and suffers a gunshot wound in the line of duty. He wakes up from a coma to find himself in a strangely abandoned hospital. After a bit of wandering, he discovers that everyone is either dead or undead. A-ha! This is how the film, 28 Days Later begins, so I thought that must be why the story seemed familiar.

Rick flees from the zombies and escapes the hospital. When he fails to find his family and friends at home, he heads toward nearby Atlanta. He eventually falls in with a group of survivors, and this is when I realized that I had actually watched the first episode of the television show several years ago.

I liked the artwork, and while blood and gore certainly doesn’t bother me, it wasn’t pictured beyond what you need to see to depict undead brain-eating monsters.

Soon enough, the plot continued past what I half-remembered, and the volume ends with a punch that was both surprising, and, in hindsight, followed logically from earlier character actions and conversations. It also ties into the initial premise mentioned in the introduction that was what actually made me purchase this book.

Two excerpts:

Good zombie movies show us how messed up we are, they make us question our station in society… and our society’s station in the world.

And:

With THE WALKING DEAD, I want to explore how people deal with extreme situations and how these events CHANGE them.

This idea echoes the theme of another novel that I enjoyed – Stephen King’s Under the Dome (the book, NOT the television adaptation!), and I hope to watch these characters struggle and change as they try to survive in future volumes. I already have volume 2, so look for my review on that coming soon!