Perambulating corpses
Chuck found Walking Dead comic compendiums at the local library - the first 2. The first compendium alone goes beyond where I had previously read, which only just got into the Governor/Woodbury arc. I gave up on the series after reading that far back in 2011, mostly because as much as I am into zombie stuff, imagining a zombie apocalypse while caring for an infant was too much for me. I just didn’t have the stomach for it.
In the intervening time, the TV series on AMC has really taken off, and more or less gone in its own direction - several characters live in the comic but die in the series, and vice versa, and even ones that are dead in both versions don’t necessarily meet their ends the same way. It’s interesting to see the parallels and contrast between the two versions, but they do tend to share the trait of being pretty goddamn depressing. I was letting Chuck watch the TV series and summarize it for me, because I wasn’t all THAT interested in watching every moment play out on the screen.
Well, anyway, I picked up where I left off, where the group of survivors is holed up in the prison when a downed helicopter and the search for anyone who might have survived the crash lead a few in the group to the nearby town of Woodbury, where they find that there are other survivors doing pretty well under the leadership of their Governor - who unfortunately for the protagonist group, turns out to be sadistic, power-hungry, and crazy in all the wrong ways. That meeting leads to Woodbury eventually attacking the prison, blowing the shit out of it, and killing a mother and her weeks-old daughter among others in the process.
Ugh.
Everything is just awful everywhere in the WD universe. Serial killers murder children. People attempt suicide, and while the main cast members don’t always succeed (at first), many of the inanimate corpses the cast encounter were self-terminated. Psychopaths gain control of a community and do fucked-up shit just because people seem okay with following orders. Good people do bad, bad things, even when it seems like it would really be too much work, not worth the effort, to torment someone before killing them to remove them as a threat. It’s depressing as shit. I know it’s all about creating conflict and drama - that’s what stories are about - but it does get to be a bit of a downer, as well as repetitive (especially with as many zombie-genre works as I have seen).
I should mention, too, the Walking Dead interactive story games by Telltale - Chuck bought and played the first one when all the chapters were released at once on a special deal, and it too was pretty depressing and bleak - especially since many of the decisions you make that supposedly alter the story don’t really alter the story much at all. Saving one person over another pretty much led to the person you saved dying shortly afterwards anyway, and events needed to advance the plot would still happen, just usually instigated in a slightly different way. Talk about bleak - no matter what you do, bad shit still happens in a BIG way. We didn’t bother with the second game - Chuck, for one, wasn’t a big fan of the “playable novel where nothing you do REALLY matters” format, and I just wasn’t that interested after the sadfest that was the first game. I did, however, watch a “let’s play” of the first chapter of the second game, and it was just as bad if not worse than the first in terms of depressing shit - within the first few minutes, one of the survivors of the first game is offed by a gun-toting thief who basically shoots him accidentally; after a time cut, the woman survivor of the first game is no longer pregnant and there’s no baby with them (whee infant mortality! Again, realistic, but depressing as shit), and the young girl who survived the first game is separated from the woman when bandits attack them, after which she finds a camp inhabited only by a dog. She befriends the dog, then within the space of minutes the dog turns on her for the can of food she’s opened, and in the course of fighting him off she pushes him onto a pike or something and then has the choice of letting it die there slowly or killing it off quickly. Aw, FUCK. Let me just gouge my eyes out now. So that game gets a big fat NOPE on my list (not that it counts for much, as I barely play any games myself).
Things are just bad and even when they get better they still seem pretty bad. Maybe that’s why I enjoyed World War Z (the book, not the movie) so much - it’s told in retrospect of “the zombie war” in a world where things got absolutely terrible for a while, but that has since improved in most places even if things still aren’t perfect. People pulled together and found ways to survive, and then to fight back, and then to start things over, despite the tragedy and horror and struggle. In Walking Dead, I suppose, we’re still in the tragedy/horror/struggle phase, with virtually no end in sight, and no trust of anything that might be good coming the way of the main cast.
So, I don’t know. I still find it interesting, but less so as I marathon chapter after chapter of comics. It’s really intense.
After initially writing this and coming back to it, I finished the second compendium - things start to look up for the protagonists. After being on the road for a while, and a whole lot of unpleasantness (fending off rapist highwaymen, exterminating an enclave of cannibals, and dealing with a mentally ill boy who kills his own twin until ANOTHER child kills the mentally ill boy because no adults want to), they reach a walled-in community with a solar power grid and a halfway-decent store of foodstuffs, plus medical personnel. That doesn’t go down super-easy either, as the group has some issues fitting in with a population used to being safe inside the walls, and things get worse when a herd of zombies winds up breaching the wall - the protagonist group attempts to flee, but it winds up a botched attempt that actually ends up rallying much of the able population to fight the zombies and kill those within the walls (with one kid and his mother getting munched and another kid being maimed by a stray shot that takes out his eye in the process). At the very end of the compendium, a man from another walled-off surviving community makes contact with the protagonists, and they quite begrudgingly trust him enough to lead a few of them to his community to check it out. Fortunately, they appear to be on the up-and-up, and have food to trade (something the protagonists need) - their only black mark being that they are being extorted for about half their goods by a goon squad. When the compendium ends, the protagonist group hopes to end the other community’s goon problem in return for food and a trade arrangement, and things really do start to look up.
Which I don’t trust at all.
It’s too much of an exercise in masochism to keep up with this stuff. I don’t mind watching the TV series so much, because they do soften things a bit - but even then, things are pretty harsh. I’m back to my original closing - I don’t think I can deal with reading any more of the comic.
In the intervening time, the TV series on AMC has really taken off, and more or less gone in its own direction - several characters live in the comic but die in the series, and vice versa, and even ones that are dead in both versions don’t necessarily meet their ends the same way. It’s interesting to see the parallels and contrast between the two versions, but they do tend to share the trait of being pretty goddamn depressing. I was letting Chuck watch the TV series and summarize it for me, because I wasn’t all THAT interested in watching every moment play out on the screen.
Well, anyway, I picked up where I left off, where the group of survivors is holed up in the prison when a downed helicopter and the search for anyone who might have survived the crash lead a few in the group to the nearby town of Woodbury, where they find that there are other survivors doing pretty well under the leadership of their Governor - who unfortunately for the protagonist group, turns out to be sadistic, power-hungry, and crazy in all the wrong ways. That meeting leads to Woodbury eventually attacking the prison, blowing the shit out of it, and killing a mother and her weeks-old daughter among others in the process.
Ugh.
Everything is just awful everywhere in the WD universe. Serial killers murder children. People attempt suicide, and while the main cast members don’t always succeed (at first), many of the inanimate corpses the cast encounter were self-terminated. Psychopaths gain control of a community and do fucked-up shit just because people seem okay with following orders. Good people do bad, bad things, even when it seems like it would really be too much work, not worth the effort, to torment someone before killing them to remove them as a threat. It’s depressing as shit. I know it’s all about creating conflict and drama - that’s what stories are about - but it does get to be a bit of a downer, as well as repetitive (especially with as many zombie-genre works as I have seen).
I should mention, too, the Walking Dead interactive story games by Telltale - Chuck bought and played the first one when all the chapters were released at once on a special deal, and it too was pretty depressing and bleak - especially since many of the decisions you make that supposedly alter the story don’t really alter the story much at all. Saving one person over another pretty much led to the person you saved dying shortly afterwards anyway, and events needed to advance the plot would still happen, just usually instigated in a slightly different way. Talk about bleak - no matter what you do, bad shit still happens in a BIG way. We didn’t bother with the second game - Chuck, for one, wasn’t a big fan of the “playable novel where nothing you do REALLY matters” format, and I just wasn’t that interested after the sadfest that was the first game. I did, however, watch a “let’s play” of the first chapter of the second game, and it was just as bad if not worse than the first in terms of depressing shit - within the first few minutes, one of the survivors of the first game is offed by a gun-toting thief who basically shoots him accidentally; after a time cut, the woman survivor of the first game is no longer pregnant and there’s no baby with them (whee infant mortality! Again, realistic, but depressing as shit), and the young girl who survived the first game is separated from the woman when bandits attack them, after which she finds a camp inhabited only by a dog. She befriends the dog, then within the space of minutes the dog turns on her for the can of food she’s opened, and in the course of fighting him off she pushes him onto a pike or something and then has the choice of letting it die there slowly or killing it off quickly. Aw, FUCK. Let me just gouge my eyes out now. So that game gets a big fat NOPE on my list (not that it counts for much, as I barely play any games myself).
Things are just bad and even when they get better they still seem pretty bad. Maybe that’s why I enjoyed World War Z (the book, not the movie) so much - it’s told in retrospect of “the zombie war” in a world where things got absolutely terrible for a while, but that has since improved in most places even if things still aren’t perfect. People pulled together and found ways to survive, and then to fight back, and then to start things over, despite the tragedy and horror and struggle. In Walking Dead, I suppose, we’re still in the tragedy/horror/struggle phase, with virtually no end in sight, and no trust of anything that might be good coming the way of the main cast.
So, I don’t know. I still find it interesting, but less so as I marathon chapter after chapter of comics. It’s really intense.
After initially writing this and coming back to it, I finished the second compendium - things start to look up for the protagonists. After being on the road for a while, and a whole lot of unpleasantness (fending off rapist highwaymen, exterminating an enclave of cannibals, and dealing with a mentally ill boy who kills his own twin until ANOTHER child kills the mentally ill boy because no adults want to), they reach a walled-in community with a solar power grid and a halfway-decent store of foodstuffs, plus medical personnel. That doesn’t go down super-easy either, as the group has some issues fitting in with a population used to being safe inside the walls, and things get worse when a herd of zombies winds up breaching the wall - the protagonist group attempts to flee, but it winds up a botched attempt that actually ends up rallying much of the able population to fight the zombies and kill those within the walls (with one kid and his mother getting munched and another kid being maimed by a stray shot that takes out his eye in the process). At the very end of the compendium, a man from another walled-off surviving community makes contact with the protagonists, and they quite begrudgingly trust him enough to lead a few of them to his community to check it out. Fortunately, they appear to be on the up-and-up, and have food to trade (something the protagonists need) - their only black mark being that they are being extorted for about half their goods by a goon squad. When the compendium ends, the protagonist group hopes to end the other community’s goon problem in return for food and a trade arrangement, and things really do start to look up.
Which I don’t trust at all.
It’s too much of an exercise in masochism to keep up with this stuff. I don’t mind watching the TV series so much, because they do soften things a bit - but even then, things are pretty harsh. I’m back to my original closing - I don’t think I can deal with reading any more of the comic.