The Walking Dead #1 (Image)

writer: Robert Kirkman
artist: Tony Moore

(from newsrama.com)

This may seem blasphemous, but you may actually want to skip the beginning of The Walking Dead.  I know, I know.  The TV series is extremely hot.  The comics (now over a hundred issues!) are popular, and the collections are consistent bestsellers.  Conventional wisdom certainly seems to suggest that you read from the start of the story.  I have no problem with that.  But this is a warning.

I've been a kind of peripheral fan of Robert Kirkman's zombie saga for a few years.  I have been by no means a regular reader of the comic, though at one point I did string together a pretty regular reading cycle.  I never got around to reading any of the collections.  I watched the second season of the TV show, when it started becoming wildly popular, and apparently enjoyed it more than others.  And that's about it.

Image recently printed dollar editions of several of its most notable current titles, and The Walking Dead #1 was among them.  I figured it was my pop culture duty to finally read how the story begins.  Turns out the TV pilot is pretty faithful (one of a few points of strict continuity between the two incarnations), so there wasn't much to learn there.

What I did learn was that Robert Kirkman at the beginning of The Walking Dead is not the Robert Kirkman of later issues.  Specifically, he's at best a pretty hackneyed writer.  Other than the concept, and my familiarity with the story and its success, I would probably outright have quit reading before the issue's end.  It's that bad.

Well, it does tend to get better once Rick Grimes starts interacting with other people (that's pretty much what The Walking Dead is all about, what every single issue is, just like the show, lots of talking and occasional zombie mayhem), so it's not so surprising.  But the early pages are exactly like the extremely bad indy comics I used to review when I first starting writing about comics on the Internet. I figured it was my duty to look beyond the DC/Marvel horizon.  In almost every instance, when it was an upstart publisher it was horrible.

I should say now that I've gotten far better at selecting the stuff that's really worth reading outside of the major publishers, and not just from established indy labels like Image, Oni, IDW.  I've simply stopped gambling.  I've grown more selective.

At this point, if this were the first issue of The Walking Dead as created for a 2013 reader, I would absolutely not have gotten it.

So it's a darn good thing that it's a series that's been around for a while and definitely knows what it's doing.  I would recommend, if you've never read the comic before, start with later or outright recent issues.  You may eventually decide to read the complete run, but now you know what that really means.  I don't read it regularly myself because Kirkman tends to keep the characters in an interminable holding pattern, one set piece after another (as the show has helped make clear for anyone who may doubt this), mostly waiting for one grizzly death of a main character after another.  How much you care for them determines how much you care about the series as a whole.

Now, I want to make clear that my objections to the first issue have virtually nothing to do with the art of Tony Moore.  You may or may not be aware that for the vast extent of the series it's been Charlie Adlard on art duties.  There's not as big a gulf between Moore and Adlard as you might think.  Where they differ is Moore's instinct to go a little more cartoonish, like Kirkman himself, which is distracting only in the sense that you may be aware that Walking Dead otherwise is pretty realistic.

The only question I have remaining is why Image chose to publish this series in the first place.  If things hadn't smoothed out, The Walking Dead would be a memory for a few scattered readers at this point.  If it had been me, especially if I were working for Image, I would have passed.  Maybe Image has more material like this than I think.  It's hard to imagine a greater transition for a series, from this viewpoint, a book that looked like it would at best be a good gimmick to a respected cornerstone and pop culture sensation.

Still, it's almost enough to make me tackle the collections and see where the transition really occurred, whether it was Moore's departure or if it was all Kirkman.