But also, the story and the art are pretty darned good. I liked it, firstly beacuse of the presentation, an over-sized hardcover that comes in a nice slipcase always looks good on the shelves. And, what the hey, may as well splurge and get the Omnibus hardcovers while I`m at it, right? So, I thought I`d give the comic another try. Obviously, I`ve watched the TV series from its beginning and have liked it very much. I don`t even know what I did with the trades afterwards, I only know I don`t have them anymore. Before the TV series, and I didn`t really get hooked. I had read these as trade paperbackes when they first came out. Wait, I forget to talk about the novel itself. Plus, this graphic novel makes shotguns and axes look pretty cool too.

We love frontiers, and the characters who are most successful recognize 'that things will never go back to the way there were.' We hate thinking about social relationship in non-dystopian apocalyptic settings. Through the apocalyptic fog the American landscape again becomes a vast frontier which settlers explore for resources and possible homesteads while fighting back the indigenous savages (zombies) and giving birth to new forms of small group government. That is, the post-apocalyptic landscape is a defamiliarized landscape, one where dominant social structures have broken down and previous methods of knowing and mapping space are no longer relevant. Let me also add that those in the vein of American 'survival horror' seem also to mirror, grotesquely, foundational narratives of exploration and colonization. I've heard that narratives of zombie apocalypse fulfill our secret wishes to kill friends, family, and neighbors (not to mention strangers).

The walking dead omnibus volume 1