Product Description

An epidemic of apocalyptic proportions has swept the globe, causing the dead to rise and feed on the living. In a matter of months, society has crumbled: There is no government, no grocery stores, no mail delivery, no cable TV. In a world ruled by the dead, we are forced to finally begin living. This volume follows our band of survivors on their tragic journey in search of shelter. Characters live and die as they brave a treacherous landscape littered with packs of the walking dead.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #13541 in Books
• Published on: 2007-01-03
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 136 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9781582407753
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
• Click here to view our Condition Guide and Shipping Prices

Customer Reviews

As we rejoin our characters, they are, well... still battling zombies
If you enjoyed the first volume of "The Walking Dead", there's no reason to not pick up this second collection. New artist Charlie Adlard's style is more scratchy and jagged than Tony Moore's smoother realistic take on things in volume one, but jagged and scratchy somehow nicely complements the story's frequent edgy jolts. This is the last handful of stories before the characters begin a long stay in an abandoned prison, so enjoy the variety of locales while you can. "The Walking Dead" isn't perfect: the bickering (between characters who have paired off into couples and between many characters in general) can get tiresome, and often there are too many dense speeches even when characters aren't bickering. But for all its faults (and they're relatively minor ones), "The Walking Dead" is nevertheless a bracing, dramatic piece of ongoing horror fiction that's a welcome antidote to usual comics fare.

Maybe I Spoke Too Soon
My review for the first volume of "The Walking Dead" was pretty much glowing. The review was even titled "A Character Driven, Sprawling Epic." That's pretty much a stamp of approval. The writing which ranged from bland to good to exceptional was balanced out by Tony Moore's art, which really gave life to Kirkman's characters.

Well, Moore is no longer the series artist, starting with this volume. He still does the covers, but the new penciller for each issue of "The Walking Dead" is Charlie Adlard, and to compare his art to Moore's is like comparing the scrawlings of an elementary level child to the prose of a published author. Adlard isn't horrible, but his panels are often ugly. The action scenes fall flat because the details blend together, leaving you guessing at what is going on some of the time. A lot of the characters are drawn to look quite similar, and it leaves you forgetting who is who.

Another bad thing about losing Moore was that Charlie Adlard's art isn't good enough to mask the flaws in Robert Kirkman's writing. As far as where Kirkman is taking the story and the plots he has going on, he's doing a fine job. However, he is pretty bad at dialogue. Every character speaks the same, and no one ever seems to be casual. To keep this exposition-heavy prose "light," he throws in words like "ain't" and "man" a lot, but that isn't enough to make these forced words seem like a person would really speak them. He needs to work on giving each character a voice. Also, he needs to tone down the sexism a tad. A few of the reviewers noticed it in the first volume, but it wasn't quite as blatant as it is here. In this story, men do the tough work and women watch the children and nag the men. That needs to change. Fast.

I was convinced I was reading a great story after volume one, but now I'm less sure. I'll probably keep reading until the end (if there ever is an end), but I'm hoping that things get a lot better than this. And yeah, I really wouldn't mind a new penciller.

6/10

Refreshing take on the genre
The Walking Dead is a very mature story that takes a look at topics ignored by many of the other examples of the Zombie Survival Fiction genre. It shows how emotion leads to action in ways that can shock modern readers' sense of stability. It provides an interesting commentary on how thin the veneer of civilization is despite all attempts by the characters to cling to it. It lets the reader experience the loss of structure and provokes thoughts of "what would I do" beyond the typical "raid the gun store, grocery store and head for a cabin in the woods" mentality we've seen before.

The entire series thus far (1-7) has been top notch and a real example of how graphic novels can tackle stories that would take a 600 page novel to cover in detail.