Fear the Walking Dead: Season 1

Los Angeles, 2010. Life for Californians is going on as normal, despite growing concerns over an illness that has been spreading through the world for several months. A sudden spread in cases and growing social media reports of soldiers shooting the infected starts to cause panic. The Clark-Manawa family make preparations to flee the city, but the US military, and the infected, have other ideas.

Back in 2015, AMC launched the first of numerous spin-offs from it's mega-hit zombie show, The Walking Dead. Fear the Walking Dead's premise is, at first glance, not the most compelling: "what if the original show, but in California?" But it does add another tweak by showing the initial zombie outbreak as it happens. In the original show, Rick Grimes missed the outbreak itself by virtue of being in a coma, whilst this spin-off depicts the collapse as it happens.

This makes for an interesting show as the characters don't know what's going on and they don't know the rules of how the walkers work, which leads to some fairly obvious mistakes in dealing with the crisis. However, there's also a bit of a "back to basics" feel as the show can't help but retread old ground. We've already seen characters discover and are then horrified by the idea that everyone is infected by the disease and are doomed to turn whenever they die of any cause, so seeing it again can feel redundant.

Where the show has to stand or fall is with its characters and they are a mixed bag. Travis Manawa (Cliff Curtis) is well-meaning but a bit too beige and too much of a people-pleaser to make tough decisions. A reliably excellent Kim Dickens impresses more as Madison Clark, the sort of no-nonsense pragmatic series lead you need in a show like this (and probably the closest analogue of The Walking Dead's Rick). Alycia Debnam-Carey is decent as Madison's daughter Alicia, but Frank Dillane is a very weak link in the cast as Madison's son Nick, whose characterisation seems to revolve around him being a drug addict and little else, whilst Dillane's performance is insipid.

More formidable is Ruben Blades as Daniel Salazar, a shopkeeper whom the family finds refuge with who initially appears mild-mannered but turns out to be a former fighter from El Salvador who knows how to get stuff done, and the charismatic Colman Domingo as conman Victor Strand. Both characters are more morally grey and add some much-needed tonal variation to the show.

With just six episodes in this first season - like The Walking Dead before it - the show is relatively fast-moving. The initial episodes show the gradual onset of the crisis, but we quickly move to a new storyline where the family's suburb is walled off to become a safe haven. This leads to a brief interlude that feels like a riff on Octavia Butler's classic dystopian novel Parable of the Sower, with people trying to keep their old lives going in the face of all evidence that it's gone forever. The final episodes switch to a more epic, action feel as the city is overrun by walkers and our characters have to flee.

This makes the season more dynamic and fast-moving, with less time to bog down in repetitive characters beats separated by too many episodes of not much happening (a repeated criticism of the mothership show, with varying degrees of accuracy based on the season). This is good. But the show doesn't entirely make a good case for its existence. We see characters learning to deal with the walkers, we see groups forming with various people trying to take leadership of them. We see arguments about being too harsh or too gentle to deal with the situation. This is all stuff we've seen before. The fact it's happening in the bright Californian sun with Los Angeles in the background rather than the dusty backroads of Georgia doesn't necessarily make enough of a difference to justify retelling these tropes.

Still, the production values on Fear the Walking Dead's first season (***½) are higher than back on The Walking Dead in its first season, the CG is much better, allowing for some epic shots of the city falling to the undead. The character drama is serviceable, though Nick's entire storyline is tedious beyond the extreme, and the actors mostly do a solid job. There's enough here to make continuing into the second season a reasonable prospect, but the show needs to do more to differentiate itself from its forebear.

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The Walking Dead: Season 8

The communities of Alexandria, Hilltop and the Kingdom have joined forces to oppose the Saviors, but they have been betrayed by one group of potential allies whilst another, Oceanside, tries to stay out of the fighting. An early victory isolates the Sanctuary and allows Rick's forces to go on the offensive against the isolated Savior secondary bases, but Negan remains a dangerous and resourceful foe. As the tides of war ebb and flow, the outcome remains unpredictable.

The eighth season of The Walking Dead optimistically promises "all-out war!" as it adapts the story arc from the comics of the same name. The early episodes lean into this, with an almost constant stream of battles, sieges, cunning stratagems and unexpected reversals. Neither side consistently wins or consistently loses (although the number of Savior losses in the opening episodes makes their later resurgence seem improbable), a nice change from most media accounts of conflicts where the good guys keep losing until the last second and then pull off a single win and win everything and hit the jackpot.

The battles in the opening episodes make for an exciting start to the season, but are a bit overwrought. Given the show's shock-jock tactics of killing two fan-favourite characters in the Season 7 opener, almost everybody develops thick plot armour and almost nobody of consequence dies (no, Alexandrians who may have been around for three seasons but only have five lines of dialogue in their entire tenure of the show do not count). This makes the stakes feel a bit undercooked. Instead we have a lot of battles - consisting of characters pointing weirdly recoilless guns at one another with CG muzzle flashes, sometimes with allies running right in front of them whilst they're firing - without much in the way of stakes to them.

The show does try to get around this by aiming for character-rooted emotional arcs: Ezekiel suffers a crisis of command after losing too many of his people in the war; Morgan being torn between not killing and protecting his friends causes a mental health crisis; Carl, recognising some proto-Negan-ness in his own character, decides to become a better person; Eugene trying to work out if Negan or Rick will better appreciate his skills; Gabriel rediscovers his faith in adversity, and so forth. Some of these character arcs are satisfying, others just feel they're there to help the show spin its wheels.

Yes, the greatest enemy of The Walking Dead is neither Negan nor the walkers, but the show's problematic pacing. A relentless foe of the franchise since it made the entire second season take place on a farm, it drags Season 8 down into the mud. Making the war last the entire season, sixteen episodes, after last season's sixteen episodes of scene-setting, was a huge mistake, resulting in several episodes where not much materially changes, even as bullets are flying. The show really feels like it doesn't have a clue what to do next when it sends the characters back to the Junkyard, again, to try to win over the Scavengers, again, only for them to betray our heroes, again. At eight episodes to end the war, perhaps with another eight exploring the aftermath (here relegated to a very abrupt-seeming vignette at the end of the season finale), the storyline would have been much tighter and more satisfying.

The season does have a few stronger elements. Dwight trying to balance his survival against being the mole inside Negan's organisation is a fun storyline, and Steven Ogg (best known as Grand Theft Auto V's redoubtable Trevor) arguably steals the season as Simon, whose charismatic backstabbing is highly entertaining. This all makes up for a subdued Jeffrey Dean Morgan, whose undeniable charisma and acting talent feels a bit let down by the inconsistent quality of the scripts for Negan. When he brings it, he's great, but when he doesn't, his story falls flat.

Mid-season the show does dispatch one long-term regular to try to up the ante, but the choice of character to kill is illogical, badly-handled and feels like a bit of a slap in the face of the actor (who famously had just bought a house near the studio because they'd been assured they'd be around for a while longer) and also comic fans, where the character in question survives all the way to the end of the saga. They do try to make the sacrifice have some weight and long-term impact on the story, but it's badly-conceived.

The season finale is also a bit of a damp squib, with the plan to win the day being incredibly illogical and desperately dependent on absolutely nothing going wrong, and the rapidity with which the losing side gives in to the winning side feels a bit implausible. One decision by Rick is also laughably unconvincing: I get what they were going for, but I do not buy at all that Rick of all people would make that choice. That said, Maggie does benefit from this storyline, coming across as a stronger and more decisive leader, and potentially setting up a conflict between her and Rick which could be genuinely interesting.

Season 8 of The Walking Dead (***) is not terrible, but it is badly-paced, overdrawn and overwrought, with some curious character choices and unconvincing plot decisions. There is, however, a lot of half-decent action, and the ebb and flow of the conflict is more interesting than how wars are usually depicted in fiction. This is possibly the weakest season of the show, but those who have settled in for the long haul should find enough here to just about keep going (along with the promise of a better final three seasons coming up, although that is debatable). The show can be seen on multiple streaming platforms worldwide, right now.

Thank you for reading The Wertzone. To help me provide better content, please consider contributing to my Patreon page and other funding methods.

The Walking Dead: Season 7

Rick Grimes and his long-standing band of companions have initiated hostilities with a group of extorters called the Saviors, thinking them just the latest in a long line of gangs of thugs and bandits they've been dealing with in the two years since civilisation fell. But the Saviors are a far larger, far more dangerous and far more unpredictable group than any they've come across since, under the leadership of the charismatic and capricious Negan. The Saviors take control of Alexandria, forcing Rick's group to work for them and executing two of their number to make sure they are taken seriously. The group is divided on how, or even to, resist, whilst others of their number find more of the network of settlements that Hilltop was just one of, and gradually realise that the Saviors have made a lot of enemies, something they might be able to turn to their advantage.

It's been a minute since we last touched base with The Walking Dead, Robert Kirkman's comic turned Frank Darabont's lawsuit target turned epic zombie apocalypse turned slightly frustrating nation-building exercise. I got so frustrated with the show's pacing being all over the place that I decided to tune out until it was over, which took slightly longer than expected, not helped by the seasons immediately following my hiatus being soundly criticised even by hardcore fans.

As a recap, Season 6 saw the gang take over the town of Alexandria, whose citizenry can be best described as nice-but-dim. Rick and his gang of hardened survivors had to take over the town for their own good, almost turning into villains in the process, a highly interesting idea that the show immediately squandered (the town is immediately attacked by feral lunatics known as Wolves and a massive zombie horde, and only Rick and The Gang have the cojones to sort them out whilst the Alexandrians just gawp), as is often the case with The Walking Dead. The latter part of the season flirted with an even more interesting storyline in which Rick and The Gang are manipulated into fighting the Saviors by the duplicitous Gregory, leader of Hilltop. The show could have had the Saviors as a more reasonable group, so Rick's pre-emptive attack was an illegitimate act and the resulting counter-strike by Negan was more justified, but again that would have made the show too interesting, so we are reassured at every second moment that the Saviors are evil, almost killing two of our heroes on a whim and subjecting multiple towns to tyranny, murder and extortion.

Still, the season was the most action-packed The Walking Dead has ever been and, whilst logic had not so much left the building but screamed out of town in a jet fighter at Mach 5, never to be seen again, there's no arguing it was fun to watch in a very dumb kind of way. This is what I call the "Game of Thrones Season 7 Effect," where character and plot logic have been sacrificed on the altar of visceral action and some sick special effects, but the latter are executed so well you kinda don't mind (and The Walking Dead was never the most subtle study in character interplay in the first place).

Season 7 continues in much the same vein. The season opens with the infamous episode where Negan gets to pontificate at Rick and, via an unnecessarily drawn-out, tension-building exercise, kills two of the regular characters in a very gory fashion. Despite the undeniable gut-punch of seeing two solid characters (one of whom has been around since the very beginning, or almost) go out, it also feels like someone at AMC decided this was going to be their Wal-Mart own-brand version of the Red Wedding and milked it for every nanosecond. The result is possibly the worst episode of the show to date, devolving into that most curious of beasts, extremely boring torture-porn.

Once the show gets over that hump, it sets about exploring its new paradigm with entertaining relish. The Saviors live at the Sanctuary, a massive factory-turned-fortress, and are extorting the people of three settlements, Alexandria, Hilltop and the Kingdom. There are also two other settlements nearby which know about the Saviors but have remained undetected: the Junkyard, home to a bunch of inexplicable weirdos known as the Scavengers; and Oceanside, home to a bunch of women whose menfolk were all killed by the Saviors, buying them time to escape and establish a secret stronghold on Chesapeake Bay. Handily, Carol and Morgan have already established contact with the Kingdom, a town built in and around an old zoo and ruled by a flamboyant ruler known as King Ezekiel (who feels like he has been airdropped into the show from the Renfair Hallmark version of Game of Thrones, but is easily one of the most entertaining characters on the show so we'll allow it), whilst Tara, who went missing at the end of Season 6 and literally nobody at all noticed, has established less-cordial relations with Oceanside.

Season 7 is, as usual, divided into two eight-episode sub-arcs. In the first Rick and The Gang are trying to make their new position of working for the Saviors fly, with some characters angrily planning revenge on Negan and the Saviors but others arguing for patience and time to regroup. Daryl has been taken prisoner by the Saviors so we get to explore the Sanctuary via him (and returning Season 6 bit-players Dwight and Sherry), whilst Maggie is trying to consolidate the Hilltop in their alliance, whilst fighting a rather one-sided rivalry with Gregory. Tara's visit to Oceanside is rather tedious, in the lowest-rated episode of the entire series, which I thought was a bit harsh; there's more than a few episodes before this in which absolutely nothing happens, whilst this at least had some solid walker-killing. A storyline in which Morgan struggles with his vow not to kill whilst Carol needs a time-out in a cottage is...okay, I guess, but only works because of the two actors.

Inevitably, after a few more Alexandrians are killed and Negan turns out to be even more loony-tunes than we first thought, Team Rick decides to fight and starts banding the communities into a big army. The weak link here are the Scavengers who are blatantly, obviously untrustworthy from the off and Rick's efforts to bring them into the alliance are ludicrous (and the fact we get the exact same story in Season 8 beggars belief). Negan also ends up moving from genuinely threatening figure at the end of Season 6 to pantomime dame, flouncing around and straining to find reasons not to kill the more popular characters blessed with plot armour. Jeffrey Dean Morgan always gives a great performance but there are a few moments where even he seems to be asking, "why am I not killing every person in this room?"

Things do get better as the season wraps up, with the web of alliances coming to fruition in a surprisingly messy finale with double-crosses and plot twists and some solid action beats. The season does quite well on this front with a few good set-pieces such as Michonne and Rick taking down 300 walkers with a weaponised steel cable, and later clearing out a funfair by themselves. The storyline in the Kingdom is unexpectedly a highlight, its daftness (Ezekiel has a CGI pet tiger) giving way to a much edgier story as they try to work reasonably alongside the Saviors but ultimately realise they can't.

Season 7 of The Walking Dead is trying to do something that most long-running post-apocalyptic media tries to do and often falters in the process: transitioning from the post-apocalypse to the post-post-apocalypse, from simple survival to nation-building. Running from zombies in the immediate aftermath of disaster with plentiful supplies to scavenge, not many survivors and tons of guns lying around (in a US-set story, anyway) is easily turned into compelling drama. Working out how to get reliable supplies of food and water, especially with a brutal local government around? Not so much, or at least it's trickier. The Fallout franchise had a similar problem with the early games set just after the nuclear war giving way to the later games set 200 years later with tons of factions and even nation-states arising, and the game developers too often falling back on post-apocalyptic tropes even where they no longer made sense, because it was easier.

The Walking Dead is to be commended for trying this tricky transition in its seventh season (***½) and it doesn't fare as badly as I was expecting, with some nice character arcs and action setpieces. But the show struggles with selling some of its plot points and ideas, and the whiff of contrivance as Rick's group need a bunch of allies to fight the Saviors and immediately meet a bunch of allies to fight the Saviors is high. The result is an entertaining-enough season of television, which recovers from a cynical and crappy start to deliver some satisfying resolution, even if you can't quite buy all the steps along the way. The show can be seen on multiple streaming platforms worldwide right now.

Thank you for reading The Wertzone. To help me provide better content, please consider contributing to my Patreon page and other funding methods.

AMC confirms the end of THE WALKING DEAD

 AMC have announced that The Walking Dead will end in 2022 after airing its 11th season, which will be super-sized as a result, with 24 episodes as opposed to the usual run of 16 episodes.

The Walking Dead began airing in 2010 under the stewardship of Frank Darabont (The Shawshank Redemption, The Green Mile). Based on Robert Kirkman's successful comic book series - which ran for 193 issues between 2003 and 2019 - the series follows a band of survivors in the aftermath of a zombie apocalypse, which mostly takes place off-screen. The focal character is Rick Grimes (Andrew Lincoln), a sheriff who is caught up in the apocalypse along with his family, best friend and some random other survivors. Over the course of the show, the initial band of survivors changes composition many times (until only two actors from Season 1 are still in the regular cast in Season 11) and it evolves from a desperate, isolated band to a group of community-leaders and nation-builders. The zombies, although everpresent, decline as the main threat in favour of other human communities of varying degrees of morality and corruption.

The show quickly became the biggest thing on television for several years, until being displaced by HBO's Game of Thrones. Recent seasons have seen sharp declines in viewing figures and critical appreciation, but with an ending in sight and a climax to build towards (which for various reasons will have to be very different to the ending in the comic book), it'll be interesting to see if the show can win back some sceptical, long-departed fans.

The show's first spin-off series, Fear the Walking Dead, is continuing to air on AMC and a second spin-off, The Walking Dead: World Beyond, set ten years after the apocalypse, is due to launch in the next couple of months. World Beyond is a limited series planned to run for just two seasons. AMC have also confirmed they will be launching a third spin-off, which will follow the adventures of Daryl (Norman Reedus) and Carol (Melissa McBride), the most popular characters from The Walking Dead and the last two Season 1 characters standing. A series of TV movies focusing on Rick Grimes is also in the planning stages.

AMC is also developing Tales of the Walking Dead, an anthology series set in the same universe involving both new and old characters from different points in the series timeline.

THE WALKING DEAD unexpectedly ends

In a move that redefines the meaning of the word "surprise," writer Robert Kirkman and artist Charlie Adlard have terminated their long-running, giga-selling Walking Dead comic with this month's issue.

The Walking Dead began in October 2003 as the "zombie movie that never ends," with Kirkman painting a picture of a world in disarray after an unexpected zombie apocalypse. Main POV character Rick Grimes, a police officer who was shot and fell into a coma in one world and awoke in another, led readers through sixteen years and 193 issues of hell, with Rick amassing a collection of friends and allies, all trying to survive in this new world. Along the way they battled a succession of powerful villains, including the Governor, cannibals and Rick's baseball bat-wielding nemesis, Negan.

Kirkman claims that the decision to end the comic in this fashion came because he didn't want fans counting down to the end, or perhaps over-hyping it. Announcing it was the final issue just a couple of days before release had been his plan for several years.

In 2010 AMC began airing a TV series based on the comic, starring Andrew Lincoln as Rick. The show became an international phenomenon for several years, before it's star was eclipsed first by Game of Thrones and then by Stranger Things. More recent seasons of the show have had a cooler critical reception and suffered from plummeting viewing figures. The show has also deviated from Kirkman's source material, including killing off major characters who are still alive many years later in the comic timeline. However, the show remained popular enough to spawn a spin-off, Fear the Walking Dead, and a forthcoming series of TV movies. The show's tenth season will begin airing later this year.

In 2012 Telltale Games released The Walking Dead, an episodic adventure game which set new standards in writing and characterisation in video games. Several sequels followed, although these were again more coolly received after the original creative team behind the first game quit the company.

The end of the comic series will likely have little impact on the TV show, since the the TV series has deviated quite far from the original. In particular, it will be impossible for the TV show to end the same way the comic book does, as the comic book relies on several characters who have been killed on the TV series.

The Walking Dead: Season 6

Rick Grimes and his fellow survivors have found a new home in the town of Alexandria. The original inhabitants were organised but lacking in steel, not having seen off the challenges experienced by Rick and his companions. Having helped defend the town from threats within and without, Rick finds himself the de facto new leader of the community and has to take action against an imminent new danger: a vast horde of walkers located in a nearby quarry who are on the verge of breaking out and destroying the town. Beyond that, there are other threats lurking outside the walls, a band of raiders called the Wolves...and another, more mysterious group called the Saviors.

The Walking Dead is probably the most frustrating show on television (although it's also traded that title a few times with Game of Thrones in its most recent two seasons). It's beautifully shot, fantastically scored and has an outstanding cast of excellent actors. The writing and characterisation, however, is highly variable and the show's tone can go all over the place, from slightly cartoonish ultraviolence to gritty realism to funny character interactions and back again, often in a very clunky fashion. By far the show's biggest problem, however, has been pacing and structure. The series has had sixteen episodes per season since its third year, which is very generous by modern American cable standards, but it has struggled, sometimes excruciatingly, with filling that time with consistently gripping drama. From its third through fifth seasons, The Walking Dead has made wheel-spinning into an almost admirable art form.

For its sixth year, the show takes a different tack and one that is quite successful in solving this problem. The first half of the season revolves around two entwined events: Rick and his friends driving off a walker horde at the same time some opportunistic scavengers called the Wolves attack Alexandria. This results in a complex, two-front battle which becomes even more challenging when part of the horde splits off and crashes the party in town. This results in The Walking Dead's most action-packed storyline to date, with eight episodes of building tension, drama and all-out warfare. The series has often been criticised for sometimes forgetting there's even zombies around (although that was kind of Robert Kirkman's point, the zombies are merely the mechanism by which civilisation falls whilst he is far more interested in the social dynamics of reconstruction) but that complaint is certainly dismissed this season. The first few episodes of the show have our characters going to war, engaging the walkers in a full-scale, all-out offensive to save their new home.

It's all splendid stuff. The characters get their moments in the sun, Carol and Tara get new romantic partners, someone gives Daryl a rocket launcher and we're reunited with (slightly inexplicably) fan-favourite bit-player Morgan, who finally joins the cast full-time and gives us the possibly the show's most bizarre stand-alone episode in which he learns aikido from a random dude in the woods and his goat. This episode is gloriously insane, makes very little sense and seems to think it's very profound, which makes it awesomely enjoyable (if not quite for the reasons the writers intended). The first half of the season is The Walking Dead at its very strongest and most gripping, even if the decision to "kill" Glen and hide his fate for three episodes remains utterly moronic.

The second half starts going a bit wonky almost immediately. The end of the battle for Alexandria sees several characters introduced at the end of Season 5 brutally murdered apparently just to keep the cast costs down, which is less tragic than just annoying. Things pick up with a fantastic Daryl/Rick road trip episode in which they meet a charismatic new character called Jesus and then learn about the existence of a network of other settlements. At this point the show's allusions to the Fallout video game series (which have always been present, if not in the actual setting, then in the general post-apocalyptic tone) pick up as Rick moves from being on the defensive to gaining a view of a new civilisation arising from the survivors, that maybe they do all have a future. Having snatched away the possibility of a cure for the Turn in Season 5, The Walking Dead makes up for it by giving us a sliver of hope that maybe things will turn out okay.

There is, of course, a problem: the newly-contacted settlements are being extorted for food and ammo by a group called the Saviors. The show very nearly does something great here by having Rick and co immediately agree to attack them without actually talking to them first, which is a startlingly ruthless (and strategically unsound) move, and thus instigate hostilities. Unfortunately the series provides a get-out clause by revealing that they're the same group that attacked them earlier in the season (and had to be sorted out by Daryl and his rocket launcher), immediately giving Team Rick the moral high ground. This only increases when we get to meet the Saviours and discover just what a bunch of bad 'uns they are. Even so, the show makes some very interesting dramatic choices, such as having our first major interaction with the group come through a group of ruthless women who have sworn in with them, resulting in an unexpectedly feminist episode where they take Carol and Maggie prisoner and we're waiting for Rick to burst in and save them, but this turns out to be unnecessary because Carol and Maggie know how to take care of business by themselves.

So if the second half of the season falters compared to the first half, at least it's making interesting and original storytelling decisions, deploying its large cast of characters in dramatically compelling ways and keeping things ticking over nicely. And then it really all goes horribly wrong in the finale.

The Season 6 finale of The Walking Dead has been justly reviled by very large numbers of both critics and fans. One of the most interesting things about the Saviors before this point is that they're nasty and ruthless, but arguably not outright evil (their insistence on murdering one person as an example has to be countered with Rick's willingness to murder all of them without even knowing anything about them), and in fact seem to be what Team Rick were on their way to becoming given a few more months. The Saviors have some wins and losses, and seem to be a match for our heroes without totally overwhelming them (as, say, the Governor did initially). In the Season 6 finale the Saviors become psychic super-savants, capable of working out exactly what roads (ut of the utter maze of highways, back roads and side-trails sprawling outside Washington, DC our heroes are going to take and blocking them off expertly, building petrol-strewn barricades in minutes and knowing precisely where our characters will stop to get out of their truck to risk a cross-country run so they can set an elaborate trap. It's the most unconvincing, contrived bit of writing I've seen in years and is embarrassingly stupid. The silliness of this ending takes away from the introduction of Negan, the Saviors' much-foreshadowed leader, played with relish by the always-good Jeffrey Dean Morgan, and really reduces the impact of his ruthless execution of one of our heroes (not that you find out who that is until Season 7).

So the sixth season of The Walking Dead (****) is very nearly the best (and is certainly the best-structured and paced), but then makes a series of writing decisions throughout the season which are needlessly annoying, particularly its reliance on fake-out deaths. But as frustrating as it can be, The Walking Dead can also be, particularly in its quieter moments of just dwelling on the world after the fall, surprisingly atmospheric and thoughtful. The show's never-ending quest for consistency continues. The season is available now on DVD (UK, USA) and Blu-Ray (UK, USA).

The Walking Dead: Season 5

Rick Grimes and several of his fellow survivors are imprisoned in Terminus, a society of cannibals. They seek to escape whilst several of their friends, such as Carol, attempt a rescue. At the same time Beth finds herself a reluctant guest of a hospital in Atlanta. Out in the woods, a frightened priest cowers in his church. But the survivors now have a promise of salvation, a cure for the Turn, which calls them to Washington, DC...if they can survive.

The Walking Dead reaches its fifth season, in which everything is awesome and our heroes are happy and smiling. Or maybe not. The season opens with our heroes prisoners in a cannibal stronghold before joining forces with a priest losing his faith and ending with them deliberately traumatising a peaceful community into accepting them as their new protectors. Along the way several major characters die for no immediately-discernible reason and the writers tease the audience with the possibility of some kind of actual over-arching storyline with a firm resolution in mind before snatching it away, leaving both characters and viewers with no hope and to wallow in misery.

Or to put it another way, welcome to another season of The Walking Dead, y'all.


George Romero - someone who knows a thing or two about zombies - once called The Walking Dead a "zombie soap". He's not wrong. That's not a criticism, because Robert Kirkman also called the story that of a "zombie movie that never ends". Week in, week out, month in, month out, on screen, in the comics and in the video games, people tune into the next instalment of this story which tries to make a strength out of the fact it has no end, no master plan and no planned resolution.

This sense of an ongoing narrative works in soap operas, however, because of the shifts in tone. Yes, characters get divorced, get into fights, occasionally die, but they also get married, fall in love and have moments of real happiness. The Walking Dead's biggest problem has always been its nihilistic streak, that the world is full of misery and pain after the Turn and that both the walkers and other people are dangerous and out to kill you at any given moment and every day is a remorseless, never-ending struggle to feed yourself and your family, to avoid injury and disease, and to find shelter and ammo. Other TV shows embrace the darker side of life, but lighten things with moments of genuine humanity (like The Wire, whose cast The Walking Dead continues to pilfer for new roles), occasional comedy (Breaking Bad) or hope (Game of Thrones). The Walking Dead does this only very, very occasionally, which makes it a harder show to watch. It's the ultimate example of "grimdark" on television, with the strengths and weaknesses of that movement.

Season 5, like the past two seasons, attempts to overcome one of its biggest problems - the inability to sustain a narrative over 16 episodes - by dividing the season into two halves. The first half sees our heroes at their lowest ebb in Terminus, but they also have the hope of a cure and an endgame in mind. This ultimately proves a blind alley which is deeply frustrating, but perhaps true to the show's basic premise. Finding a cure for the walkers would, ultimately, feel like a cheap way of ending the series, even if it did provide some kind of upbeat resolution.

The first half of the season is a mixed bag. Our heroes spend way too much time hanging around in a church and the enemies they face from Terminus are characterless ciphers. There's a very half-hearted attempt to inject pathos by suggesting these people were once as good as Team Rick, but turned evil after meeting some bad people. But they never really follow up on it in enough depth to justify the sheer depravities they resort to. This part of the season also makes an ill-considered choice to use fractured, non-linear storytelling, moving from place to place, reversing back in time to fill in back story and accelerating forward again. Non-linear storytelling is a great device when handled well, but The Walking Dead uses it instead in this instance as a way of annoyingly retconning storylines and engaging in cheap emotional manipulation (when Person A was about to die and you thought Persons B and C were miles away, but it turns out in a flashback that Persons B and C were miles away hours earlier, and are now ready to save Person A). It also allows them to pad out the story with filler episodes in which not much happens. The Walking Dead TV show has always been far superior at characterisation than the comic books, and sometimes its use of quieter episodes to expand on character is effective. In the first half of Season 5 it never really works, however.

Once the show returns from its mid-season break, it regains a sense of momentum. Our heroes arrive on the outskirts of Washington, DC (those expecting some great shots of an abandoned Mall won't get them: the show's relatively low budget is never quite as painfully obvious as this season) and find a new safe haven, Alexandria. This results in a much more engaging storyline in which our heroes are presented as the unsafe invaders in a peaceful and stable community, Rick's ruthless pragmatism presented as cynical selfishness and maybe even outright villainy by the existing community leaders. This idea of turning Team Rick into the bad guys has always been an ace in the show's hole and their employment of it is well-assured, accompanied by some excellent performances. However, the show presents even this storyline with the training wheels still on. The revelation of a new group of bad guys who employ tactics far worse than anything Team Rick have done; some of the people in Alexandria turning out to be cowards and murderers; and the Alexandrians genuinely not having a clue about the world outside mean that our sympathies remain firmly lodged with Team Rick throughout. When offered a chance to make a genuinely interesting point on morality, The Walking Dead shrugs and keeps walkin' instead.

Still, The Walking Dead's primary strengths remain intact: some excellent actors, fantastic prosthetics work and some outstanding moments of cinematography and framing of shots. On a moment to moment basis, the show is mostly watchable and there are some outstanding action scenes. Carol (Melissa McBride) remains the best performer on the show, with some brilliant scenes and the opportunity to channel her inner soccer mom in the concluding episodes. She also gets most of the best lines. Many of the other actors also do quality work. But the sense remains that the show needs more of a sense of an endgame and more of a direction to the story. A zombie soap is great fun, there's only so long that it can keep doing that and remain fresh.

Season 5 of The Walking Dead (***½) is available now on DVD (UK, USA) and Blu-Ray (UK, USA).

The Walking Dead: Season 4

Rick Grimes and his fellow survivors of the walker apocalypse are still living in a prison, which they have fortified into a refuge and where they are growing food to augment their supply-raiding of surrounding, abandoned towns. However, they are unaware of growing threats outside the prison, including the return of an old enemy.

The Walking Dead continues to be one of the oddest shows on television. On the one hand, its a big-budget, crowd-pleasing depiction of the mass killing of zombies. On the other, it's a bleakly nihilistic portrait of people who seem to only ever be a few more catastrophes away from committing group suicide. More than once whilst watching a particular season, the idea comes to mind that the show is completely pointless, lacking as it is in any kind of long-term direction or plan for survival beyond holing up for a bit and seeing what happens.

If the show's lack of a long-term focus is a problem, it's one the writers manage to (mostly successfully) push to the back-burner by emphasising individual moments and the crisis of the day. A debilitating disease sweeps the prison in the opening episodes and no sooner is that burning itself out then a full-scale war is underway, after which the survivors are scattered across the countryside and have to fight their own battles to survive. This structure seems to have emerged after dissatisfaction with the previous season's main storyline, which in order to get to sixteen episodes had to resort to lots of cheap filler.

The show's overlong seasons are still a big problem, but the fourth season certainly handles it better by treating each of the two halves as its own eight-episode serial. The first half is tighter, with the characters more closely bound together and even confident enough to spend two full episodes on exploring the backstory of a secondary character in detail. The second half is more sprawling and more of an anthology series, with the characters divvied up into random teams and having to survive without the benefits of the larger group. This allows hitherto chronically-underdeveloped characters like Beth to emerge much more strongly as fully-rounded figures. The arrival of survivors from Texas on a mission which might actually tie into the origins of the walker plague, and the discovery of a new refuge accepting people in from a large area, also gives the show that much-needed sense of direction in its final episodes of the season as well.

There are still weaknesses. The show is prone to repetition, and the zombie-killing is now so routine that the characters seem as bored by it as the viewers are. The structure of the season is a big improvement on the previous one, but events are still too slow-paced and the producers could have done with cutting to the chase a bit more quickly.

Still, the fourth season of The Walking Dead (****½) emerges as the best to date. Entertaining, if at times bleakly so, and always well-acted, the show could still do with a bit more focus and certainly less episodes per season, but it seems to be on the right track. The season is available now on DVD (UK, USA) and Blu-Ray (UK, USA).

The Walking Dead: Season 3

More than seven months after being forced to flee Herschel's farm, Rick Grimes and the group he leads are tired, ragged and badly in need of shelter and a place to relax. Stumbling across an abandoned prison, they set about clearing it of walkers and turning it into a base of operations. Meanwhile, Andrea, separated from the rest of the group, has hooked up with a sword-wielding loner named Michonne (who uses 'neutralised' walkers - with their arms and jaws removed - to carry supplies). They find an apparent safe haven in the town of Woodbury, run by the apparently well-meaning 'Governor'. But it isn't long before Rick's group and the Governor's followers run into one another, setting the scene for a major confrontation and testing the loyalties of those in both groups.

The Walking Dead is a contradictory series. On the one hand, it's often compulsive viewing. It's more ruthless to its characters even than Game of Thrones and Lost (the latter of which it is beginning to resemble more and more) and the show puts a pleasing emphasis on taking common sense precautions against the zombie threat (although it's not above using individual moments of implausible stupidity for dramatic gain). On the other, it often promises more than it delivers and the first two seasons both had a tendency to deploy filler material. The third season is an attempt to tackle these issues and play to the strengths of the premise whilst not getting bogged down so much. Unfortunately, this was sabotaged from the get-go by AMC's demand that the season be extended to sixteen episodes, which turns out to be about four too long.

The series starts off promisingly. The delayed discovery of the prison (which we saw in the final shot of Season 2 close to Rick's group but it's taken seven months of them going round in circles to get back to it) and the need to clear it out provides a lot of dramatic impetus in the early episodes. Splitting the group, getting Andrea and Michonne to Woodbury and a dramatic reunion with a missing former member of their group all provide strong storytelling opportunities. The introduction of the Governor, played with relish by David Morrissey, is well-handled and giving Rick a nemesis and someone to bounce off is a great idea. The first half of the season is indeed The Walking Dead at its best, featuring some rich scenes of character development and even some satisfying action scenes (even if the ease with which walkers are now being dispatched compared to earlier seasons is starting to get a little silly).

Things deteriorate rapidly in the second half. Some rather bizarre wheel-spinning kicks in and we get a face-to-face confrontation between Rick and the Governor which really doesn't do anything, as well a completely pointless episode featuring two characters playing cat-and-mouse in an abandoned warehouse. As more excuses are found to delay the big finale battle, things get less and less plausible until scenes that were supposed to be powerfully tragic become instead rather comical. There's also less focus on the day-to-day details of living with the walker threat; in the final episode people are casually leaving gates open and walking past biters without too much care. The second half of the season does retain some dramatic highlights, such as Carl Grimes graduating from 'pointlessly hanging-around kid' to 'PTSD-suffering child soldier' and the intriguing arrival of Tyreese (played by The Wire's Chad Coleman), but it's a far cry from the opening half.

Ultimately, the third season of The Walking Dead (****) is watchable, entertaining and features some very strong dramatic scenes and elements in its first half. The second half is more disappointing, featuring significant lapses in plot logic and characterisation. If anything, whilst the second season (which was a little too static) benefited a lot from being viewed in rapid-fire on Blu-Ray, the third season suffers, with the longueurs in the second half being far more incongruous than if viewed from week to week. The season is available now in the UK (DVD, Blu-Ray) and USA (DVD, Blu-Ray).

The Walking Dead: Season 1 (adventure game)

The dead have risen and the world has been thrown into ruin. A band of survivors gathers together to try to escape the chaos, but find that their greatest enemy may not be the walking dead, but themselves.

Much has been written about Telltale's computer game adaptation of Robert Kirkman's The Walking Dead comic series, usually involving such words as 'amazing', 'intense', 'emotional' and 'cried like a three-year-old'. They are not far off. With The Walking Dead, Telltale have achieved what may be the finest computer game adaptation of a pre-existing franchise in gaming's history, something that supports the original story whilst also standing completely on its own two feet.

The Walking Dead takes place in the same world as the comics (but not the TV series, which is an alternate reality) and is canon to them. The developers - working alongside Kirkman - take advantage of this to show off the backstory of comic characters Hershel and Glen, but for the most part the focus is firmly on the original characters created for the game. Chief amongst these is the player-controlled protagonist, Lee Everett. Lee is a criminal who was on his way to prison when the zombie apocalypse broke out, and some of the game's tension comes from whether he is honest or not about his background to his new-found friends.

The core relationship of the game is between Lee and eight-year-old Clementine, a young girl he rescues from a zombie attack on a house. A long-term goal of the game is to reunite Clementine with her parents (if they are still alive) in Savannah, Georgia, but as the game continues Lee becomes convinced that the chances of her parents still being alive are very slim and takes on a father-figure role himself. The relationship is well-portrayed by the writers and actors, with the apparent oddness of an unrelated non-parent (who is also a convicted felon) caring for a young girl he just met being addressed. The characterisation is extremely strong, though to so more of it may risk spoilers (a problem for any review of the game).

The game has echoes of events from other incarnations of The Walking Dead, such as whether it's a good idea to teach young children how to use firearms against zombies or not, but Telltale puts their fresh spin on each idea as it comes up. Particularly well-handled is the way that the same major worldbuilding bits of information from the graphic novels are discovered by this group of characters, but in a rather different manner to the comics. For example, the knowledge that everyone will become a zombie when they die (regardless of whether they are bitten or not) - a major revelation in the comics and TV series - comes up almost immediately in the game, whilst a more minor piece of info about the zombies that the comic series threw in almost immediately takes a long time to come up in the game, and is much more decisive (and horrible).

The Walking Dead's storyline is impressive, with the zombies acting as a catalyst for how the characters interact with one another and deal with the pressure of a crumbling civilisation. The game hits many of the same beats as the TV series and the comics, but in a much more immersive way due to the way your decisions have lasting consequences, and some events can be changed. The dialogue is well-written, with each of the five episodes having its own self-contained plot and thematic arc as well as contributing to the overall storyline of the game. Given the lack of time (even at 15 hours, there a lot of characters to get through), Telltale achieve an impressive amount of depth for each character in the game as well. In terms of writing, structure and pacing, The Walking Dead is excellent.

Where the game comes off the rails a bit is the gameplay. Simply put, you spend the majority of your time watching The Walking Dead, rather than playing it, and most of your controls are based around choosing dialogue options. The sections where you get to take control of Lee, talk to other characters at leisure, explore areas and solve puzzles are the most fun in the game, but also the rarest (roughly boiling down to one or two such sections per episode). There's also a significant number of irritating Quick Time Events as well. It's a tribute to the writing skills of the team behind the game that these issues are not the total game-killers they'd be in other titles, but it does make The Walking Dead less of a game and more of an interactive comic (though still a very good interactive comic).

More problematic is the fact that the game is sold as one where your choices matter, but the truth of that is up for debate. At one stage you choose to save one character or another and this leads to some different character scenes and dialogue for a while, but ultimately has no long-term ramifications. The major beats of the plot and most character deaths also happen regardless of your dialogue and choices, with what you do more impacting on other characters' reactions to you and what they do rather than anything substantive in the storyline. Oddly this doesn't seem to matter: moreso than in most games, it's the journey that matters much more than the resolution.

The Walking Dead (****½) is an intense, well-written and extremely atmospheric adventure game, but one where you do not have as much control over what is going on as what is promised or written. How much of an issue this is will be up to the player, but I found it easily ignored in favour of the smart writing and the fascinating character relationships. The Walking Dead: Season 1 is available now on PC, X-Box 360 (UK, USA), PlayStation 3 (UK, USA) and iPad/iPhone. A second 'season' will be released later in 2013.

The Walking Dead: The Heart's Desire by Robert Kirkman

Rick Grimes and his band of survivors have taken shelter from the zombie menace in an abandoned prison, only to become embroiled in an internal dispute. The arrival of a mysterious, katana-wielding woman sows further discord amongst the survivors. Events eventually prompt a moment of revelation for Rick.

The Heart's Desire is the fourth graphic novel in The Walking Dead series, Robert Kirkman's 'zombie movie that never ends'. It immediately picks up the storyline after the third book, Safety Behind Bars and...well, doesn't go very far at all.

The Heart's Desire can best be summed up as the Crossroads of Twilight (the infamously static tenth novel of Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time sequence) of The Walking Dead. Nothing much happens of consequence to the overall story arc. The characters regrouping and taking stock of themselves after the first three books would make sense, but Kirkman is not a sufficiently good-enough writer of character to make this work across such a length of time. He is solid at plotting and structure, but his characterisation skills are highly variable (at best) and quite lacking during this particularly collection. The story breaks down into a melodramatic soap opera, with characters more concerned about who is sleeping with who and who should be in charge than actually dealing with the zombie menace or their own survival.

There are flashes of competence here, but these are not developed far enough. Michonne has a hell of an entrance and shakes things up a bit, but then doesn't really do anything. Rick angsts at some considerable length about the burden of command which would have made for a more interesting storyline if it hadn't been so badly-written. In fact, the entire book seems to be building to Rick's moment of self-revelation at the end which is puzzling: Rick realising that the zombies are not the 'walking dead' is something I think most readers latched onto in issue #1, and is the reason for the title of the entire comic book series. Kirkman presenting it as some kind of massive plot twist is simply inexplicable, and ends the book on a completely pointless note that led this reader with little desire to read on in the series. It is rather telling that the upcoming third season of the TV show will apparently condense the events of the third graphic novel with the one or two that come after it to create a far more compelling narrative than relying on the events of the third and fourth books alone.

The Heart's Desire (**) is a seriously sub-par and disappointing entry to The Walking Dead franchise. It is available now in the UK and USA.

The Walking Dead: Season 1

Rick Grimes, a sheriff in a small Georgia town, is shot during an altercation and ends up in a coma. Waking up weeks later, he finds the hospital abandoned and corpses everywhere. He quickly discovers that the country is overrun by the walking dead. Rick sets out to find his missing wife and son, hoping they made it to the promised 'safe zone' in Atlanta, but finds that the city has fallen. But there are other survivors out there...


Based on Robert Kirkman's comics, The Walking Dead is essentially a zombie movie that 'never ends' (or at least will go on much longer than any zombie movie or even series of zombie movies). Frank Darabont, the much-feted director of The Shawshank Redemption and The Green Mile, has applied his writing and directing skills to Kirkman's comic to create something quite impressive.

The Walking Dead's opening episode is bleak and cinematic, with Rick's predicament ably transmitted through Darabont's claustrophobic direction and Andrew Lincoln's superb performance as Rick. Lincoln, a Brit best-known for his comedic role in Teachers, plays Rick's frustration, fear and concern for his missing family to perfection. The first episode, with Rick alone against the zombie hordes, is arguably the best, but the remainder of the short first season, which sees Rick link up with a band of survivors outside Atlanta, is only a notch down in quality.

The rest of the first season concerns itself with the survivors arguing over what to do next and explores the dynamics of the group. Rick's old cop partner Shane has been leading the group, but finds himself supplanted by Rick, which leads to some tension. Two of the other members of the group are racist thugs, setting up tension with the black and Hispanic members of the group, whilst another survivor takes out his frustrations and anger with the situation on his wife. It's not a happy group, and the writers and directors do a good job of exploring the characters and their interactions whilst remembering to bring the zombies on every once in a while to cause mayhem.

Production values are extremely high. The zombie effects are great (a couple of them are obviously fake heads over ordinary people's faces, but these are very rare), up there with the best movies, whilst Atlanta (population 5 million, including the surrounding area) looks convincingly abandoned and bleak. There's a couple of ropey CGI explosions, but beyond that, The Walking Dead looks and feels like a big-budget movie.

The story unfolds at a pretty good pace, though there's a couple of divergences in the second half of the season and a few moments of possible wheel-spinning. However, given that one of the appeals of the story (in both comic and TV form) is that it has the time to show such side-plots and explore the fall of America to a zombie horde in greater detail than a film or novel, that's not an invalid thing to do. By the end of the season there's also a renewed sense of purpose, as the survivors realise that the CDC (Centre for Disease Control) HQ is in Atlanta and may have some of the answers they are looking for. This marks the biggest change from the comics, where the CDC is not mentioned, but as Robert Kirkman (who wrote the fourth episode of the series) points out that's only because he didn't know it was there. If he had, the comics would also have gone there. This sets up a number of interesting possible storylines for Season 2.

Season 1 of The Walking Dead (****½) is a terrific, well-paced and well-acted post-apocalypse series. Let down only by a couple of meandering story threads, it's otherwise a great piece of television. The series is available now in the UK (DVD, Blu-Ray) and USA (DVD, Blu-Ray).

The Walking Dead: Safety Behind Bars by Robert Kirkman

Rick Grimes and his band of survivors have found a promising safe haven: a well-defended prison with lots of fences, gates and other areas where the zombie menace can be contained. Of course, the prison itself has to be cleaned out of zombies first, and the surviving inmates have to be negotiated with. Eventually it looks like the gang has a new home...but a spate of murders suggests this might not be for long.


The third volume of The Walking Dead has our heroes reach the next stage of the traditional post-apocalypse, survival horror narrative: having survived the road trip they're now fulfilling the 'living in a safe haven with other survivors' trope. As usual, Kirkman plays the cliches pretty straight, to the point where there is some enjoyment found in identifying which character is about to be offed next by the serial killer or the zombies, which other one is about to crack up next and which one of the new characters is a good guy and which is a psychopath. Kirkman's writing steps up a notch here with more focus on character-building and giving the protagonists more depth. The book ends on a cliffhanger with two groups facing off against one another, but both sides are pretty justified (from their own POVs) for why events have built to this impasse, with bad calls and mistakes from both parties.

There's some other nice ideas here, including impressively logical story developments. Volume 2 saw our heroes split into two bands with the final parting appearing to be permanent. However, with the discovery of the apparently zombie-safe prison not far up the road, the first group nips back to tell the second about it and they agree to re-team up. This is not satisfying from the POV of emotional drama, but is a pretty sensible and realistic thing to do (though it probably worked between on the monthly book, when the separation and reunion were separated by months, rather than in the collected edition where it's a few minutes). There's some more entertaining zombie kills and effective action beats.

Where this edition really succeeds is in deepening and darkening the story beyond its predecessors. The serial killer story is disturbing, with some sick moments showing that other humans may be more dangerous than the zombies to the survival of the group. There's also a few other storylines that delve into the more psychological aspects of trying to survive in a dying world, showing the writer flexing his muscles and trying out some different and interesting techniques this time around.

Some of the same weaknesses from before remain. Dialogue is still patchy, with a tendency towards over-explaining things, and the artwork is still variable (though better than the second collection), with again the zombies being well-portrayed and the main characters less consistently so.

Still, Safety Behind Bars (***½) shows the story developing along the right track. It'll be intriguing to see where the story goes next. The graphic novel is available now in the UK and USA.

The Walking Dead: Miles Behind Us by Robert Kirkman

Rick Grimes has been reunited with his wife and son at a refuge outside of Atlanta, along with his police partner Shane. However, a series of violent events and Shane's death have compelled the refugees to look elsewhere for shelter. With supplies of food and petrol dwindling and encounters with zombies becoming more desperate, Rick has to lead the group in search of a safe haven.


Picking up immediately after the events of Days Gone Bye, Miles Behind Us collects issues 7-12 of The Walking Dead, Robert Kirkman's popular 'zombie movie that never ends' (Shaun of the Dead creator Simon Pegg provides the introduction for this collection, appropriately), and takes us on the next stage of the traditional zombie narrative: the road trip through undead-infested territory. Surely the stand-off in the shopping mall can't be far off?

The road trip narrative gives this collection a bit more of a narrative hook than the character and plot set-up of the first book, with an episodic series of encounters with fellow survivors and other zombies culminating in our heroes finding a possible refuge on a remote farm. Unfortunately, this is undercut by Kirkman's ongoing biggest problem: he writes clunky, exposition-focused dialogue which does not sound even remotely natural, and he has a tendency to wander into corny line territory very easily. In addition, the strong point of the series' sparse artwork becomes less effective here (probably due to a change in lead artist). The art is great at depicting zombies but struggles with the human characters, and here with several similar-looking characters in the same room following what character is doing what task becomes more challenging.

Still, despite the clunky dialogue, stock characters and slightly less-effective artwork, there remains something oddly interesting about the story. Maybe it's the hints of the psychological damage our protagonists are experiencing (a sequence involving a farmer and a barn is surprisingly powerful) or the nice paralleling as their living conditions become less tolerable in time with their slowly cracking nerves and mental states, but there's definitely the feeling that there is a lot of untapped potential here. As such, whilst this collection fails to capitalise on the strengths of the first book, it remains promising. However, the story has to step up in the third volume otherwise I suspect I will not be proceeding any further.

Miles Behind Us (***) is available now in the UK and USA.

The Walking Dead: Days Gone Bye by Robert Kirkman

Police officer Rick Grimes is wounded in a stand-off with a criminal and ends up in a coma for a month. Waking up, he finds the hospital abandoned, no staff in sight and a bunch of flesh-eating zombies walking around. Learning that the undead have risen and destroyed much of civilisation, he resolves to head for Atlanta in the hope of finding his wife and son.


Over the past seven years, The Walking Dead has become one of the most popular comic series around, attracting critical acclaim, strong sales and a well-received television adaptation from Frank 'Shawshank' Darabont. Days Gone Bye collects the first six issues of the comic, forming an introduction to the series, the premise and the characters.

This is mostly scene-setting stuff, and features relatively little that will startle or surprise readers. Rick wakes up (in a virtually identical - but given the timing, coincidental - manner to the movie 28 Days Later, which in turn appears to have been inspired by Day of the Triffids), learns about the Zombie Apocalypse which, in fine tradition, goes completely unexplained, and sets out to find his missing family members, in the process learning more about the post-apocalypse world, how to fend off the zombies and so on and so forth. Once he finds shelter at a small camp of survivors outside of Atlanta, traditional leadership struggles emerge as the group tries to survive the zombies outside and intrigue within the camp.

There is little here which is really notable or transformative in the zombie genre, lacking say the different, documentary-style approach of Max Brooks's World War Z. What it does do is use the traditional zombie tropes to drive a familiar story and do it in an entertaining manner. The group of survivors is made up of various archetypes who are lacking in originality or notable depth, but there are some nice flourishes to the characters that makes them identifiable and interesting. Kirkman engages with cliche in many areas, but also backs off from it in others: his zombies can survive decapitation and Rick's hunt for his family could have been a long-running arc, but is in fact resolved very quickly.

Dialogue is often clunky and overburdened with exposition, but Tony Moore's artwork is effective. The black-and-white, sparse images intermittently get over a feeling of a dead or dying world, whilst his zombies are often more detailed and impressively-drawn than the living characters. This gives rise to the feeling that, rather than the zombies being the walking dead, it's actually the characters who are now devoid of life and purpose (backed up by the constant arguments through the second half over what the group should do next). This is an interesting idea and it'll be telling whether this is developed in future volumes.

Days Gone Bye (***) is a little too traditional and plays things too safe for a zombie epic, but clunkiness aside is an effective enough opener to make the reader try at least the second collection to see where the story goes next. It is available now in the UK and USA.