The Zombie Apocalpyse (Post 2): A Review of *The Walking Dead* Compendium 1

After reading The Walking Dead Compendium 1 (that's issues #1-#48), I was inspired to think about the "generic" status of the "zombie apocalypse" genre. It struck me as a very interesting, liminal genre that isn't quite a fantasy, isn't quite a science fiction, and isn't quite a supernatural horror. If you're interested, here's the post: Defining the Zombie Apocalypse

There's lots more to be said about this interesting issue. And yet--I wanted to do something a little less abstract today.

I want to review The Walking Dead issues #1-#48, something useful for a change. I want to make a case for why you should invest in a copy of the compendium and take the time to read it.

But first, a brief reflection about my relationship with comic books...

I've never been much of a comic enthusiast. I guess this is because the image and character of the super hero never stirred me. I don't know why. I can't say why.

There's nothing about the over-the-top hyper-masculine  hero with super powers that I find intrinsically distasteful (hell, one of my favorite characters of all time is Conan of Cimmeria--a kind of "superhero," although he doesn't have super powers).

I just couldn't get into Spiderman or the X-Men or Superman. The comics I read when I did read them were more D&D or sword and sorcery derivative: The Savage Sword of Conan, Conan the Barbarian (Marvel); and The Warlord (DC) were and still are my favorites (I have a fair collection of them).

Once I started graduate school, some friends of mine who shared my genre interests introduced me to what they described more "artistic" comic books, which folks tended to call "graphic novels": Alan Moore's The Watchmen, Charles Burns Black Hole.

Sidenote: I think this term, the "graphic novel" is kind of funny. It's my sense that the term "graphic novel" is meant to portray the idea of these work's aspiration towards artistic seriousness. Historically, of course, novel, was a kind of artistic pejorative word, detonating a type of colloquial writing in contrast to verse. It's a kind of "validating term" enthusiasts use in order to claim some artistic credibility. Science fiction enthusiasts do a similar move when they refer to their favorite genre as "extrapolative fiction" or "speculative fiction."

My favorite validating term for comics term is "sequential art," which connotes the theoretical and formal.

And now, my review of The Walking Dead...

Long story short: I was first introduced to The Walking Dead as a graphic novel. Little did I know, it was actually a monthly comic and what I had been given was a compendium of many issues.

This is where I'd like to begin: reminding folks that Walking Dead: Compendium 1 is not a single novel. It wasn't written, I don't think, as an overarching narrative (I could be wrong--this is a critic's hunch).

It feels as if the narrative unfolds as you read it. In other words, it seems to respond and adapt to previous events. You get the sense you get with other serialized narratives (I'm thinking of shows like Lost, Battlestar Galactica, etc.) that the writers are exploring and tracing characters, subplots, and scenarios as you are reading.

With that said, there's a quality to The Walking Dead I'd like to call "narrative vitality." The story seems alive. What do I mean by this? Well, as I read, I don't get the sense that the writers know precisely where the narrative is going, i.e. whose going to live, what's going to happen. I find this as the primary source of the narrative's pleasure. Often times, when you turn the page and are surprised to see one of your favorite characters (who you thought was a main character) being eaten by zombies, you get the sense that the writers were just as surprised as you.

The narrative is just great. It possesses a kind of adaptability, as if at the end of each issue the writers had no idea what was going to happen. And, more importantly, they seem to have been open to the development of any scenario. This is what keeps you reading, this idea that anything could happen.

O.k.. Enough about narrative. What about the style?

I'm not as qualified to discuss in any substantial way visual art. I just don't have the vocabulary for the conceptual tools. With that said, let's give it a try!

First off, the art does change throughout the compendium. They change artists. From issues #1 to #6 the artist is Tony Moore; and at issue #7 the artist changes and becomes Charlie Adlard.

I really like Moore's artwork; however, I absolutely prefer Adlard's. There's something visceral and dark about Adlard's work that conforms so wonderfully to the dark world related by the comic book.  I would describe Adlard's work as beautifully manipulating dark and light shapes. It's tends towards "evocative two dimensionality," I think, and relies less on shading and more on high contrasts between black and white. It's so interesting.

Summary: if you like the AMC show, The Walking Dead, I highly recommend you read this, the comic that inspires it. It's just as mature and exciting and intriguing as the show; at times, it much more intense than the show. The Walking Dead is a comic book at it's best.

It beautifully probes how the struggle to survive intensifies and modifies our sometimes dark, sometimes inspiring, human nature.

Female Imagery in Sci-Fi/Fantasy/Horror (Post 4): Tony Moore's Cover for #19 Walking Dead -- Michonne

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.

Female Imagery in Sci-Fi/Fantasy/Horror (Post 1): Frank Frazetta's Vampirella

Hello all! My name is Nicole, Jason's wife. I have really been enjoying reading Jay's blog these past few weeks, and I've decided to contribute a few sporadic posts to a series of my own here -- a visual-rhetorical analysis of selected artwork. I'm also a sci-fi/fantasy/ horror FANATIC and really love reading these genres. I hope to start writing in the genres too! To help with that, I'll be posting on some of my favorite pieces of sci-fi/fantasy/horror visual art and other images. We can learn a lot about what makes these genres so evocative, I think, by taking some time to think about the images that come to represent them. And so, for my inaugural post, I'll look at a very famous Frazetta image.

Frank Frazetta was a well-known fantasy artist who helped to create a distinct look and feel to the genre, especially its pulp and comic book figures. Known primarily for his renderings of Robert E. Howard’s Conan the Barbarian character, much of Frazetta’s work presents images of hyper-masculinized and/or hyper-feminized figures. The word that I feel best describes his work is gritty, and this comes through I think particularly in his use of colors. He blends dark hues to produce dirty browns, greens, and reds, which give an impression of earth mixed with dried blood. Frazetta also employs shadows to emphasize his male figures’ muscles or female figures’ curves.

This cover of the first issue of the comic Vampirella demonstrates many of these traits. The image of the rising (or setting?) moon fills the background, and it appears extremely bright in comparison to the brownish-red sky that surrounds it. However, it is not a pure white, but a blending of cream, grey, blue, green, and redish hues; it seems reminiscent of a harvest moon. Vampirella herself stands confidently in front of this looming moon, the faintest shadow of what seems to be bat wings reflected on the moon directly behind her, a hint of her shape-shifting ability. She cocks out her right hip while her left foot rests on a human skull, which she could most likely easily crush. Like all of Frazetta’s female figures, Vampirella appears to be a strong, sexy woman. She is not thin but instead curved, perhaps what some would call voluptuous. The bright red, scanty cloth that appears strategically placed on her body accentuates her curves, as does the use of shadowing. Using shadow, Frazetta implies that Vampirella has hips and a bit of a belly. His choice to emphasize features like these seem especially interesting given that at the time of this publication (the late 1960s, early 1970s) was the beginning of the rise of the rail-thin supermodel. Vampirella is no Twiggy, however, but instead a kind of femme fatale, a true vamp.

The interplay between the text and the image is also striking as it directs the viewer precisely how to understand the image. The very top of the page, in yellow text, signals to the viewer that the contents of the comic will “bewitch and bedevil.” Vampirella’s body gestures also suggest this: her left hand placed suggestively on her left hip, while her right hand, specifically her right index finger, coyly placed by her mouth. The words “bewitch” and “bedevil” further reinforce her position as a creature, a type of other, something to be feared but also to be fascinated by. The black text placed above her head on the moon warns the viewer to “look out!” because “she’s waiting inside this first collector’s edition…for you!!” For me, it is this text that diminishes the effect of the image. By calling attention to the commodity nature of the comic, its status as a collector’s item, Vampirella becomes more like a model, a mannequin, a tool used to sell goods. Other textual elements now stand out: the large #1 at the top left of the page; the 50¢ mark on the right side of the page.

It might be easy to dismiss Frazetta and his work as being sexist. I would like to argue that instead, he was being very true to a genre in which female characters can be just as strong and commanding as their male counterparts. For me, what ruins this impression with this image is the surrounding text (obviously not incorporated by Frazetta), which focuses on the nature of the comic as a thing to be bought and collected.