As a newcomer to comics and graphic novels, my experience reading The Walking Dead beginning a couple years was wonderful. I loved the immersive characteristics and qualities of the medium. The characters, of course, seem more real because of the interplay between the text and images. But there's something so charged about Tony Moore's cover for issue #19 of the series.
Michonne's entrance in the storyline speaks to her fiery, unstable, strong, beautiful character. She's deeply flawed, as are all the characters in the series. That is where some of the eerie realism of the graphic novels peaks out behind the zombie apocalyptic front.
No one could go through such extraordinary life-shattering events and be the same. This, or course, is what creator Robert Kirkman wanted to do: to write a zombie tale that focused primarily on the survivors. This is why there are several issues where the characters do not even encounter zombies. The real threat, more often, are the other survivors, the other people.
Desperate times do things to people that they wouldn't expect; they change. And this is where the image of Michonne speaks to everything she has endured and will continue to endure.
One of the first things that catch my attention in this image are the colors. Her bright green and blue socks, her fluorescent pink skirt, green jacket, blue vest, and yellow scarf stand in stark juxtaposition to the grey and brown of the surroundings and the pale, dead flesh of the walkers she has chained behind her.
Her colorful outfit speaks to the life she had before all this happened. She was once a different kind of person, one who was perhaps happy, even spirited. Her demeanor, however, creates an additional juxtaposition to the outfit.
She stares ahead, her lips tightly pursed. She has a cold intent, one that she needs in order to survive. (Of course, in the series, we get glimpses into her previous life, particularly what she had to do immediately after the outbreak. It makes sense, then, her intense look.) Her look is closer in tone to the surroundings: unforgiving, unpleasant, a sign that bad things will come.
Outstanding in this image, too, are the way she grips both the chains that lead the zombies (without giving too much away, we learn that they were once important people in her life) and the katana. She is, again, like a force of nature, like the storm that whips the wind around her and brings the dark clouds behind her.
As an image of the female in the realm of the fantastical (and yes, I'm including the zombie apocalypse in the fantastical), Michonne presents a type of reality that transcends simple gender roles. Her strength and frailty, her wrestling with the past and how it will impact the present and future, are characteristics that anyone, under extreme circumstances, could call forth.
But what makes Michonne's character so engrossing is that so few in this world do, or at least do so in the ways she does.
No comments:
Post a Comment