The Walking Dead, Vol. 1: Days Gone Bye Author: Visit Amazon's Robert Kirkman Page | Language: English | ISBN:
1582406723 | Format: EPUB
The Walking Dead, Vol. 1: Days Gone Bye Description
From Publishers Weekly
Taking a well-worn genre—flesh-eating zombies overrun the world and the unlucky surviving humans must deal with the gruesome aftermath—and approaching it from a purely character-driven point of view propels this series into the spotlight from out of nowhere. This collection of the first six issues of the ongoing series opens with police officer Rick Grimes awakening from a gunshot-induced coma. From here, he's immediately dragged into a world where dangerous revenants are shambling amok without any sort of an explanation. From the moment Grimes comes to, it's a harrowing battle to avoid hordes of decomposing zombies and a hope-against-all-odds search for his missing family. Grimes makes his way to Atlanta, the nearest large city where there may be other living people, and events take several unexpected turns upon his arrival, as he meets up with a rural encampment of survivors. Of course, as in recent hit movies
28 Days Later... and
Dawn of the Dead, the last humans may turn out to be as much a danger as the zombies. Forceful scripting that gives the book a strong grounding in reality, crisp b&w artwork, a shocking final sequence and brisk, gory proceedings elevate this book from the trash heap of pedestrian horror comics.
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- Paperback: 144 pages
- Publisher: Image Comics (September 26, 2006)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 1582406723
- ISBN-13: 978-1582406725
- Product Dimensions: 10.2 x 6.6 x 0.3 inches
- Shipping Weight: 13.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
I was out of the comic book reading hobby for several years, but I have to say that I was glad that i came back to reading comic books again. One of the first titles that hooked me this second time around was Kirkman's The Walking Dead for Image Comics. I have to say that its taken the current renaissance of zombie films and books and ran away with it.
Using the same slow, shambling zombies that Romero first made popular with Night of the Living Dead and its subsequent sequels, Kirkman continues the story where Romero usually ended his films. All those times people have wondered what happened to those who survived in zombie films need not imagine anymore. Kirkman has created a believable world where the dead have risen to feast on the living, but has concentrated more on the human dynamic of survival in the face of approaching extinction.
I won't say that the story arc collected in this first volume has little or no zombies seen, but they've taken on more as an apocalyptic prop. One can almost substitute some other type of doom in place of zombies and still get a similar effect (as was done in Brian K Vaughn's equally great series, Y: The Last Man). What Kirkman's done is show how humanity's last survivors are now constantly, desperately adapting to a familiar world through unfamiliar circumstances. Characters from the start make the sort of mistakes regular people would make when they don't know exactly everything that is happening around them. Instead of chiding these people as one reads their story, we sympathize and hope for their continued survival.
I am hopeful that the rest of the collected trades will be equal to and maybe surpass this first story-arc.
Let's talk, for a second or two, about the coming Zombie Apocalypse, the subject of Robert Kirkman and Tony Moore's ambitious and brutally beautiful graphic novel series "The Walking Dead".
Let me break the bad news to ya, big guy. You're not going to survive it.
Everyone watches zombie flicks with the notion that they'll survive. They're going to be one of the shotgun-toting mall-rustling heroes when it dawns on everybody that the Army ain't showing up.
Well let's put it to you this way: the Zombie Apocalypse is coming, and you're not going to make it. You're going to go get your mail, or be carrying your groceries out of the supermarket, and that's when you're going to meet your first Zombie. You've got a billion things flying through your noggin, Champ: pick up the kids, college tuition, your crazy stock portfolio, war and rumors of war, bio-terrorism, the big presentation at the Office tomorrow.
The Zombie is very Zen. It clears its mind. It has one single, driving purpose: it wants to sink its yellow tusks into your flesh and sample a little human pad thai.
Isn't that the way it always is---these things, like summer guests, always occur when you're just not prepared?
That's the guts of "The Walking Dead". Writer Kirkman states out front that he's less interested in a straight-out horror story---zombies springing out of the darkened woods and chowing down on some filet-au-Bob---than he is in exploring the dark thickets of the human brain exposed to what Kirkman calls "Extreme Situations".
Exactly.
The story follows Kentucky police officer Rick Grimes, thrown into a coma after a routine traffic stop goes bad. Just like "28 Days Later" he wakes up in an empty hospital.
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