Friday, December 17, 2010

Scenes FromThe Walking Dead


Above is a panel from the graphic novel The Walking Dead by Robert Kirkman, which is now a series on AMC and recently concluded its first season. I only caught the last two episodes of The Walking Dead, so missed the first four episodes. This is from the first episode.



This is the so-called "Bicycle Girl" scene, also from the first episode. If you have to meet a zombie, it should always be one with no legs. That scene alternates with one of a man in his home with his son, waiting for the opportunity to kill his now zombie wife. He has no trouble shooting the myriads of others that come into range of his rife, but when his wife comes into view, he can't seem to do it.



It's too bad this season only had six episodes, but in a way, its good. Its a sign that AMC probably wanted to invest heavily into top notch production values, but couldn't see their way clear to invest in more than six of them. Now that the series has proven to be a big hit, there will probably be more episodes next season, which unfortunately won't be until late next year, I think October.

When they return, I hope they put more emphasis on the zombie menace like they did in these two segments. In the last two episodes, which are the only ones I saw, they were more focused on the human survivors. This is understandable to a point, but the zombie action was still too sparse from my taste.

It was explained as some kind of virus that killed the personality of the original person, leaving them brain dead except for the brain stem, leaving them in effect more animal than human, dead but reanimated and acting solely out of pure instinct, with a ravenous hunger for living flesh.

That doesn't quite square with the little girl zombie in the first segment stooping to pick up her teddy bear, which would seem to hint some retention of prior human attachments. Oh well, dramatic license and all.

There's so many directions this thing can go. What if a woman gave birth to a dead baby, or it died in her arms while she slept and started gnawing on her? For that matter, what if it died in her womb?

How about a human-zombie love affair? It should definitely be living male human to zombie female. Sepsis as a sexually transmitted disease would just be wrong on every level.

I'm kidding, of course. Here's a run-down of the first episode.

And here is a review of the graphic novell on which the series is based.

And I just have to include this video by Kirby Krackle, called Zombie Apocalypse.