The Walking Dead Compendium Vol. 1

Product Information

Thankfully the one thing the televised version got right was that the Zombies are only a minor part of the story. The writing focuses more on the characters and how they react to the world than the world itself. The dark elements ( really dark) are mostly born from the monsters that the characters become, not the monsters that might be eating their mother. Okay, I'm going to say this right up front, and everyone can get as huffy as they'd like: it's all true. Where to begin? I really enjoy reading comics (or graphic novels, if that's the term you prefer) and am constantly on the lookout for something new to enjoy in the genre. For the most part, I tend to read classic, well known stuff like Alan Moore's work or Maus or things like that. Recently I got the itch to try out something a bit more, well, recent! Something new and fresh.

The Walking Dead: Compendium One is a phenomenal and definitive post-apocalyptic horror adventure where a group of survivors attempts to find hope in a world filled with unhinged or deceased monsters. If these questions interest you more than simple zombie killing, The Walking Dead will make you very happy. Yes, there are zombie killings aplenty (drawn in super graphic detail, to the point where you probably shouldn't be eating anything while you read this), but the zombies are not the problem here. These aren't 28 Days Later zombies (which, if we're going to get technical, weren't really zombies at all) that are smart and run scary fast. These are slow, dumb, lumbering things that hunt mainly by smell, and whose strategy for finding food is basically to wander around and hope to stumble within grabbing distance of something edible. The zombies in The Walking Dead are not a huge threat. The threat is the people left behind, trying to make a life in this disaster wasteland aftermath. Why I said "yes": Show is great (which was also recommended from above mentioned friend) and pure realization that I need to step out of my comfort zone when it comes to entertainment. ((You mean I can't read dirty romance novels and period pieces for life?)) Book Genre: Apocalyptic, Comic Book, Comics, Dystopia, Fantasy, Fiction, Graphic Novels, Graphic Novels Comics, Horror, Post Apocalyptic, Science Fiction, Sequential Art, Zombies

Artists

The Walking Dead Compendiums are a great way to own all of the comics in the series with four giant books. These are easily read as huge graphic novels and feature the same story as the individual issues. And then there's the fact they did THAT to MY FAVORITE CHARACTER DAMN YOU HOW DARE YOU DO THAT YOU BAD BAD BOYS!!! The characters in this story make hard choices and sometimes do terrible things in the name of survival. But, with very few exceptions, there are few characters that we cannot truly come to understand and identify with. Their decisions and their reactions make them richer, more interesting, which is what truly makes for a fascinating and engaging story.

I hated how the characters were penciled so inconsistently. Glenn in particular is either a fairly good-looking Asian kid, or a chubby and unattractive white boy. What the fudge? He's not a difficult character to draw - I mean, he doesn't even have hair. C'mon - a little more effort, please? Morgan is outside chopping wood. Then he comes in and talks to Duane. They talk and Morgan gives Duane a game boy for Christmas since they don't know the exact date. He tells Duane to conserve his batteries because they are hard to find. He then talks to Duane about paying for everything they "stole" to survive. He says sorry because the thoughts are sad and he should not be talking about this stuff but Duane didn't pay attention because he was playing his game. He then says Merry Christmas to Duane. And also, they will find soon enough that zombies may be deadly, but men are evil. Zombies aren’t guilty of their actions, men are quite aware of theirs. I loved the fact that because the two vary in the way that certain plot points play out, and they change up who dies and when, it made the comics completely unpredictable. I had no idea what was going to happen and it was fantastic.In our society, you never would want to go prison, but in an apocalyptical dystopia plagued with zombies, a prison would look like the logical choice. The writing is melodramatic as all get-out. I didn't get the impression that the writers had any idea what characters they had intended to survive - it's an amateurish device to kill off your characters, particularly given how dependent the story becomes upon characters constantly dying. Sure,it's meant to convey the new reality - but we all know how zombie movies and post-apocalyptic scenarios work... lots of people die, because it's no longer a friendly world in which everyone can survive without a thought. Killing off so many characters, when you've already got a very small cast, just strikes me as emotionally manipulative. In a movie, it's cool with me; your commitment is two hours or less and it doesn't really matter if the entire character cast ends up butchered or eaten alive. In a long-running series of books or comics, it's cliched and awful. So the series is basically about about character development. And that's great! But if you do it badly, you end up with a cheap soap opera. And that's what The Walking Dead really is: a mediocre soap opera. With zombies. Even the zombies are kind of lame and serve primarily as an excuse to include mindless action scenes, which do little to break up the monotony of it all.

This gives up the first 48 volumes of the comic series You can read this compendium or just read them one at a time or there are in-between sized volumes to read. It is a very in-depth series that is worth taking your time through it. Lots of small details in the art especially. it is a gritty style that I am not normally a fan of but in a zombie apocalypse I think I'd be hard-pressed to find better. The body count started on the first chapter making them to realize that ANYBODY may be the next one to fall. My favorite television series The Walking Dead is not like that. I read the first compendium of the comix it was based on to see if they were like that. They are not. They are full of rich post-traumatic goodness. Er, badness. This is about people who are so messed up by the zombie apocalypse that you realize the title may really be referring to them.Tony Moore is an American comic book artist, whose work consists mainly of genre pieces, most notably in horror and science fiction, with titles such as Fear Agent, The Exterminators, and the first six issues of The Walking Dead. I knew that the show had deviated from the comics in a number of ways, but there were FAR more differences than I anticipated. Lots of new characters, characters having storylines that were very different from the show, characters having storylines that other characters in the show had...missing characters! The list goes on.