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"How many hours are in a day when you don't spend half of them watching television? When is the last time any of us really worked to get something that we wanted? The world we knew is gone. The world of commerce and frivolous necessity has been replaced by a world of survival and responsibility. An epidemic of apocalyptic proportions has swept the globe causing the dead to rise and feed on the living. In a matter of months society has crumbled, no government, no grocery stores, no mail delivery, no cable TV. In a world ruled by the dead, we are forced to finally start living."

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Recovering from a near fatal gunshot wound, Officer Rick Grimes wakes up from a coma in an empty hospital room. In fact, all of Harrison County Memorial appears to be deserted -- or abandoned. Well, maybe not quite abandoned as all the dazed and weak Grimes can find -- wherever he turns, are masses of the undead ... E'yup. At some point while he was out of it, the dead have risen and begun feasting on the living: Zombieapocalypse. (Don't you hate it when that happens? Reason #435 of why I hate hospitals.)

Unsure of what's going on, the desperate and confused Grimes manages to fight his way out of the hospital and makes a bee-line for his home, where hopefully, his wife and son are waiting for him. They aren't. And the whole town is just as abandoned as the hospital -- except for all the zombies shuffling around trying to eat him. Combine all that with the horrors he's witnessed since waking up, Grimes starts to unravel -- until he's gonged over the head with a shovel.

Grimes eventually wakes up to an apology from Morgan Jones. Seems his young son, Duane, thought Grimes was one of those things. Jones goes on to explain what happened (-- but not how or why), and basically, within a span of several weeks civilization as we knew it has collapsed. He also says that when the crisis began, the government urged citizens to head to any major city to be better protected from the outbreak. (So FEMA would be in charge during a zombie invasion? Man, no wonder we're always screwed in these things.) This news perks Grimes up: his in-laws live in nearby Atlanta, so he figures Lori, his wife, took their son, Carl, there and makes plans to go and find them. 

You get the sense that Jones doesn't have the heart to tell him what a monumentally bad idea that is -- since all the major cities have been overrun and saturated with the not-quite-dead, but he remains silent and declines to go with him. After a quick raid of the Sheriff's station's arsenal, and several pointers on how to take a zombie out, Grimes commandeers a cruiser and heads toward Atlanta, holding onto the one thing that's keeping him sane: seeing Lori and Carl again...

...Author Robert Kirkman swears his main goal in The Walking Dead is not to scare people, and at that he succeeds. Now don't get me wrong; there's plenty of creepy and ghoulish things to be found in these panels, but at it's heart, these books are more Soap Opera than Horror Movie. And don't let that scare you off, either. Panel after panel of nothing but zombie carnage may sound like a great idea, but would probably grow tedious by issue #7 or 8. It's the human element, not the zombie element that makes this thing work: they're here; they're dead (and trying to eat you); get used to it. That is the crux of his narrative.

So Kirkman focuses instead on Grimes and his efforts to keep a rag-tag collection of survivors alive and safe. Our protagonist finds Atlanta in ruins and soon falls into a deathtrap, only to be saved by Glenn -- a former pizza delivery boy, who sneaks into the city for provisions. Once safely out of the city, he leads Grimes back to a refugee camp, consisting of about a dozen or so survivors, including -- rather miraculously, Lori and Carl, who were shepherded there by Shane, Rick's friend and fellow deputy. This reunion is a happy occasion -- except for Shane, who has a thing for Lori that seemed to be bearing much fruit with Rick presumed dead.

Things begin to heat up after several raids into Atlanta for provisions and firearms. Shane -- the de-facto leader, thinks they need to stay put, so when the army comes, they'll be easy to find. But Grimes doesn't think help is coming any time soon and believes staying in one spot is a real bad idea; for more and more zombies are stumbling into the camp with each passing day. As leadership slowly shifts from Shane to Grimes, things come to a head when the camp is attacked and several of the group are killed. Shane then snaps and blames everything on Grimes -- things were going fine until he showed up. They fight, and when Lori comes to Rick's defense, angered by this perceived betrayal, Shane flees into the woods. And when Grimes goes after him, he realizes too late that Shane is going to kill him. But unbeknownst to either man, young Carl followed them and shoots Shane first, killing him. And that pretty much wraps up Volume I.

Volume II opens with a flashback revelation that on the road to Atlanta, Lori and Shane had a consensual sexual encounter. And to compound matters even further, Lori is now pregnant; and who the heck knows who the father is. In a different time that infidelity might have mattered, but things are far, far from normal.

With winter settling in, Grimes rallies his troops and they all pile into a Winnebago to search out some much needed supplies, and warmer and safer surroundings, away from the city. (Winter has come; a blessing as the zombies appear to freeze solid, and a curse due to the lack of heat.) And in one truly disheartening scene among a ton of disheartening scenes, someone realizes it's Christmas, but Grimes tells them to stifle that talk, not wanting to pile up anymore grief on the children of their group. On the road they pick up a few more stragglers and find a gated community surrounded by a large stone wall that appears to be a perfect place to bivouac for awhile. They clear out a house and find plenty of food, and hope to find more of the same in the other houses the next morning. It seems like a good plan, almost too good to be true. And we all know what happens in zombie movies when things start to go good, right?

Right. 

Turns out the stone walls weren't keeping the zombies out; they were keeping the zombies in. And as things quickly go in the crapper, the refugees escape, barely, but not without a few more casualties. Running out of food, gas and hope, the group finds another improbable oasis with a fenced in farm. Hershel, the owner, lives there with his six kids and a couple of neighbors. And it's his medical skills as a veterinarian that saves Carl from a gunshot suffered during a hunting accident. He welcomes them to stay until Carl recovers, and things settle down for a while until a lone zombie wanders by. When Grimes moves to put it down, this causes Hershel to go ballistic. Seeing them as infected patients that can be cured of what ails them, the farmer can hardly believe that these strangers have been killing the zombies all along. In fact: all the ones he's come across he kept locked up in the barn -- well over a dozen. And I think we all know how this is going to turn out, right? 

Right.

Who dies and who lives to show up in Volume III I'll leave up to you to find out.

Like I said before, The Walking Dead is a lot more Days of Our Lives than Day of the Dead; group dynamics, crisis management, adulterous affairs, betrayal, and lots and lots of screwing punctuated by the occasional zombie attack. And all I can say is, so far so good. Kirkman really isn't breaking any new ground here, convention wise, but as author Stephen King once purported: [paraphrasing] It doesn't matter that the idea is cliché, but what your story does with that cliché. And Kirkman has sustained that cliché and my interest to see what happens next to these people for over 40-issues. So at least to me, he must be doing something right.

The art shows the chaos in stark black and white and subtle gray tones. Tony Moore's work in the first collection shows a more defined line, cleaner details and characters, while Adlard's work is more blunt and to the point. Both artists can handle the shambling hordes and deliver the grue, so either style works for the subject matter, and my only complaint is with Adlard, who has trouble discerning one person from another, and because we're dealing with almost twenty characters, it's sometimes hard to tell who the heck is who.

One thing that always bugged me about this genre, from the very beginning, was the anatomy of the living dead. In Kirkman's story, it appears to be an infection and you don't need to be bitten to become a zombie. All you have to do is die (-- a bite just seems to speed up the process.) Somehow the brain reactivates, and I assume some kind of electrical impulses from this organ keeps the body going, and the brain is the key. There are several instances where a zombie's head is lopped off, rendering the body inert, but the head continues to chatter about, making a blow to the cranium the critical step in stopping them. Which in my thinking, would make a machete and a simple hammer the most effect zombie fighting tools. Step one, lop off the head, step two, a whack to the forehead. Lather. Rinse. Repeat.

But is this some airborne virus gone amuck, or is there a supernatural explanation for this plague of the undead. I ask this because -- and I usually don't like to bring too much science into my science fiction -- but the question has to be asked: If these people are really dead, it'd take about a week (-- depending on environmental factors --) for decomposition to reduce the corpse to bones. Before that, necrosis, bacteria, maggots and other factors would reduce these bloating menaces to putrefied soup within a few days. (Something else that's never been touched on that I'm aware of in film or fiction, but, my god, can you imagine what the world smells like now? And I don't want to think of the diseases being spread by vermin with all that rotting flesh lying around.) My point of all this is: unless this is supernatural in nature (-- then we can throw science and biology out the window), or the virus somehow mutates the body and reduces the decaying process greatly (-- some decomposition has to be occurring -- I mean, just look at them), the zombieapocalypse is a lot more survivable than one might initially think. All it would take is a matter of holing-up and waiting for nature to take it's course, and then have protective protocols for the newly deceased and we're gold. Easy. Sounds like the perfect plan, right?

Right.

Wait a sec -- aw crap...