Two weeks ago, while visiting my sister, she gave me the first three volumes of The Walking Dead and said, “you’re gonna love this”. I have been craving a really good graphic novel or comic series since I read Y The Last Man. I just finished Volume 2 of The Walking Dead and I’m hooked! I took the time to read the intro where the author candidly explains why he decided to write about zombies.
“I’m delving into subject matter that is so utterly serious and dramatic… Zombies. To me, the best zombie movies aren’t the splatter fests of gore and violence with goofy characters and tongue in cheek antics. 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. They show us gore and violence and all that cool stuff too… but there’s always an undercurrent of social commentary.”
“With The Walking Dead I want to explore how people deal with extreme situations and how these events CHANGE them.”
And so far, he’s done that very, very well. I love it when people say “I would never do that!” ’That” can be anything – prostitution, killing someone, stealing from your best pal, etc. Dude, you have no idea what you’d do in the middle of a zombie infestation! Some of us will never know what we’re truly capable of until we’re placed in an extreme survival situation. Some of us would become natural heroes and some of us would betray our own families and friends.
The author could easily have replaced zombies with an attack of werewolves or a flu pandemic or an alien invasion.. perhaps even a series of natural disasters. What matters is that the structure that we’ve established in society completely crumbles and people, the healthy ones, are left to fend for themselves. Zombies are great because they’re a constant threat and they add a new dynamic – how do you let go of someone you love after they’ve been bitten?
What I love the most is what’s written on the back of Volume 1:
“How many hours
are in a day
when you don’t spend
half of them watching television?
When is the last time
any of us
REALLY
worked to get something that we wanted?
How long has it been
since any of us really
NEEDED
something that we WANTED?
The world we knew is gone.
The world of commerce and frivolous necessity has been
replaced by a world of survival and responsibility.
An epidemic of apocalyptic proportions has swept
the globe causing the dead to rise and feed on the living.
In a matter of months society has crumbed,
no government,
no grocery stores,
no mail delivery,
no cable TV.
In a world ruled by the dead,
we are forced to finally start living.”
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2 Comments
This is so true. We never know what we are capable of doing or not doing, unless we are facing a situation that makes us question ourselves. Like what I went through a couple of days ago…
Hi Lucia,
Tell me more about what happened to you… feel free to send me an email instead of a public comment if the issue is private.
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