Rate this book

The Walking Dead, Compendium 1 (2009)

by Robert Kirkman(Favorite Author)

4.42 of 5 Votes: 4

ISBN

1607060760 (ISBN13: 9781607060765)

languge

English

genre

Horror

publisher

Image Comics

review 1: What TWD is about at its best is not really about zombies, per se, but ethics. Like many a vintage Star Trek episode, it asks what people look like in an alien world in which conditions are most desperate: what does it mean, really, to be moral in a zero-sum survival game? Is it enough to protect yourself and your loved ones? Can one aspire to anything more?The answer is, more often than not, that either sociopaths have always walked among us and come into their own in the wasteland, or that the wasteland turns formerly good people into sociopaths. The answer is that no one who stays pure survives, and that no one who survives stays pure. Horrible compromises of principle are required to keep alive, and one can only hope at the end of the day to hate the horrors he or she ... morehas committed when a moment of safety grants space for reflection. And then, of course, you realize that Kirkman's world is a deromanticized version of ours, only in his world, people cannot hide from their atrocities, cannot outsource and whitewash and externalize the things they do to others for survival and occasional comfort while living in constant terror. It is an existential fable in which we cannot lie anymore about death coming for us all in the end.
review 2: What I liked: displays all the selfishness of humanity, all the flaws, all the fighting and grasping for survival. What I didn't like: my soul has a giant hole in it. I feel like I need my brain scrubbed. I attempted to read a Good Housekeeping magazine to try to put some cheer in there but all it's frivolity and "cheap steals for under $25" made me wish for a zombie-apocalypse. I used to think that, if something like this would happen, I could survive and be the better for it. The zombies would weed out the stupid people. Not true. So now, do I wrestle with the banality of life and fight it, or have another bowl of queso and watch daytime TV, surrounded by my comforts? I should probably give this 5 stars because of the amount of thinking this graphic novel has provoked but I can't bring myself to love it. less

Download links for: The Walking Dead, Compendium 1

Advertising