Product Description

As the survivors settle into their prison home something has drawn them out into the open... out of the prison... out of their sanctuary. This is a major turning point for the overall story of The Walking Dead, setting the stage for years to come.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #32605 in Books
• Published on: 2006-10-11
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 136 pages

Customer Reviews

Best Non-Super Hero Comic!
Amazingly, this series is not about zombies. It is about the end of the world and how the remaining humans struggle to survive in this distopia. Not since "Lord of the Flies" have we seen or read about the baser nature of humanity, once modern technology and institutions are removed.
If you are a fan of "Lost" or "Battlestar Galactica", you will love "The Walking Dead". Start with "Volume 1" and enjoy!

another winner
Volume five brings in new enemies--human enemies. Again, great story and the artwork is wonderful.

Another excellent volume.
Robert Kirkman, The Walking Dead: The Best Defense (Image, 2006)

A lot of names get tossed around when you start talking about the best graphic novel series going today. I'm guilty of it myself; I know I've used that particular phrase at least twice (unfortunately, on two different series). When one sins, one might as well compound the sin mercilessly, I guess; The Walking Dead has, for the moment, supplanted both 100 Bullets and Bleach in my estimation as the best graphic novel series going today.

Zombie literature (and, of course, filmmaking) is by now such a vast subgenre of horror that one is capable of subdividing it into subgenres of its own; there's "genre" zombie work, which simply revels in the gore, and "literary" zombie work, which is more concerned with the surviving humans and their interaction, where the zombies are, most of the time, nothing more than a backdrop. That's the paradigm Romero gave us with his Night/Dawn/Day movies, and it seems to be the approach most of the better writers in the genre take. Kirkman has been down with it since day one; the zombies are here, but they're window dressing a good deal of the time, a corporeal version of, say, The Andromeda Strain. The actual story to be found here focuses on the small band of survivors who came together in the first few books, found their way to a solid and easily-defensible prison, and have mutated into something like a large extended family. Kirkman, in The Best Defense, explores the forming of that family bond deeper, while using a subplot to introduce a menace far more dangerous, and terrifying, than the zombies. (The crux of this subplot is one of the better sequences of graphic storytelling I've seen; it's shamelessly manipulative, but it's so brash that you end up not caring. When you realize how Kirkman sucker-punched you, there's nothing you can do but smile.)

As you may be able to surmise form that paragraph, there's not a great deal of action in this volume. It is, in fact, much quieter than the books that came before it. This is not to take anything away from the book's readability, or the quiet power that suffuses it. Kirkman is excellent at what he does, and it's books like this, where the nonstop action takes a break and focuses entirely on the characters, that shows you just how excellent he is.

If you're not reading The Walking Dead, you should be. ****