This is less a review then it is my own visceral reaction to reading the 4th volume in the Walking Dead hardcover series. I was in love with this story but now we've had our first major fight and I think we might be breaking up. Therefore please excuse me if this comes across a bit messy.
I'm just on the hardcovers, not the issues, but even though I'm about 8 issues behind, I'm asking myself the question - "What happened to the Walking Dead?". I just read the 4th hardcover tonight. I finished it, put it down and said: "Well, I think I might be done with the Walking Dead." It's simply not an enjoyable read anymore.
The genre of this book is 'survival horror', or at least that's what the book tells us. Well, it's not much of a survival book if no one survives! Too many main characters died in this book. All of the storylines that were so wonderfully built up over 40+ issues were destroyed, most with no resolution. It's fine to kill your characters. Just do some of them in dramatically appropriate ways. Instead, we got torture porn.
'But it's a horror book!"I hear you scream. To me, there is a difference, a line. The stuff with the governor crossed that line from horror to torture porn. The death of Tyreese in particular in issue 47 was also more then a bit too much for me. The fact that Rick lets it happen and everyone else just watches left me dumbfounded.
I hate the pointless deaths of Tyreese and Carole and Lori and Judy. Carole's I could at least understand. Lori and Tyreese, however, were killed purely for shock value. What was the point of their gruesome deaths? I need to have characters to care about for me to keep reading. After being responsible for both deaths, I think I now completely hate Rick, leaving me with very few characters to root for.
Walking Dead has turned into a massivelly nihilistic drain. I need to read something with at least cautious optimism. This is instead a slab of relentlessly cold depression that needs to show that it actually is moving toward a series finale before it loses me completely. I have to find some hope in this story in order to stick with it to the series conclusion.
Oh.. and the art was magnificent.
Story: 3 - Good
Art: 4 - Very Good
