After a serious dose of reality from Trump & Kiyosaki's "We Want You to be Rich", I was ready for something short and trashy. I found it with the 1st volume of the graphic novel "The Walking Dead" by Robert Kirkman and Tony Moore. My husband, who is my zombie enabler, bought me the 1st volume when he was popping in to our local comic book store.
I flew through the novel in just under two hours, but then again there wasn't an abundance of text for me to consume. Instead the focal point was the graphic quality. The novel is totally in gray scale and I'd heard from my husband that his "dealer" had told him that this had to do with the explicit content of zombies eating flesh and it all being shown. The graphic novel was roughly 100 pages or so, but I'm not really sure because the pages weren't numbered. All I know is that the $10 cost for merely 2 hours of entertainment seemed a bit steep. I'm not even at a stage in my life where 2 hours of Harry Potter could be justified as costing $10. What concerned me about the price was not the fact that I couldn't afford $10, but the fact that this booklet was the first in a series-- which made me feel that the story was being milked for all it was worth-- which indicated a more serious committment if I chose to continue the series.
The story itself was simple: Rick wakes up from a coma. He's a police officer who's been shot and forgotten in a hospital while zombies have taken over. Rick stumbles back to reality, gets enough information that he packs up his police gear and heads south in attempt to find his family. He gets rescued by a looter and the looter named Glenn takes him to the makeshift camp with a rag tag group of travellers. At the camp Rick is reunited with his wife and child and one of his buddies from the force and meets several new faces.
Rick and his buddy, Shane, are at odds because the brawny buddy has already fallen for Rick's wife and apparently the wife and Shane hooked up during a trying time. Mind you, Rick was only in a coma for a month and a few days passed between waking up and finding his family. Rick suggests that the camp begin to prepare for winter by moving to a more secure area away from the city and that all of the camp members need to learn how to shoot. Shane doesn't want to leave the camp's spot but he goes along with teaching all the members of the camp how to shoot- including Rick's young child named Carl.
The camp gets attacked by a small mob of zombies and two of the camp members are sacrificed, but Carl proves himself as valuable by saving his mother's life. Shortly hereafter tensions culminate to the point that Rick and Shane have a shouting match and it comes out the Shane is in love with Rick's wife, Lori. Shane aims his shotgun at Rick, while shouting about how Rick has ruined his life and Carl, Rick's young son, shoots and kills Shane.
While I'm looking for another zombie addiction, I don't think the Walking Dead series will be my new addiction. While I enjoyed the images and the brief amount of story, I just can't justify the bang for the buck. I feel a bit cheated. That being said, I've found myself reading a bit of non-fiction again so that I don't feel so used.
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