Today was an awful lot like yesterday, except that it was, of course, a Friday. And not just any Friday, but the Friday before a three-day weekend. Which is always nice.
I stayed up much too late last night finishing the first book of The Walking Dead comic. I liked the television series quite a bit, even if I had some minor issues with it and thought the middle episodes — can such a short season even be said to have middle episodes? — were perhaps not anywhere as strong as the beginning and end. But I genuinely liked it.
I can’t say the same for the comic. It’s received accolades and even an Eisner, but by the end of twelve issues I had grown to actively dislike it. I’d decided not to continue on with the subsequent books. I found the characters potentially compelling, but ultimately one-dimensional (or less), and oh my lord was there a lot of dialogue: endless speech balloons of heavy exposition, sometimes even obscuring the artwork — which, I have to say, is the one thing I really did like, especially in the original six-issue run. Characters talking about what they were going to do, what they had done, who they’d been (in great, unnecessary detail) before the zombie outbreak, etc., and not very surprising, often repetitive action handled fairly perfunctorily. Lots of readers seem to like the series because it deals with the characters and their interactions, the zombies being almost incidental. It’s not a story about zombies, they’ll tell you, but about human survival. Which is great; stories about things or plots are never as interesting as stories about people, for the simple fact that it’s we, as people, who are reading them. But there’s a big difference between telling a story about characters and telling that story well.
And in its meandering, talky, unconvincing way, The Walking Dead just doesn’t do that.
It also diverges pretty wildly, pretty early, from the television series, which I think rightly borrowed what worked, improved upon what was suggested, and dropped what didn’t work. The show wasn’t perfect, but I’ll be returning to that. I won’t be returning to the comic.
Other than that? We had a meeting/presentation this afternoon to discuss the plans for our office move in April. Things are still uncomfortably vague — how much space will we have? how open will this open plan be? — but we got some concrete details and can expect more in the next couple of weeks. I’m nervous about some of what I’m hearing, but there’s little I can do about it at this point.
Of course, the office move is definitely going to screw with my commute, and almost certainly necessitate my moving.
Hmm. I was thinking I’d put off watching the TV series until after I’d had a chance to check out the comic, but now I’m having second thoughts about that.
After the first issue, they are very different.
I worried, a little, that my viewing of the TV series might have unfairly colored my experience of the comic. Of course it’s more talky, I thought. The comic doesn’t have the same bag of tricks to pull from. And I do tend, often, to prefer the version I discover first, sometimes for no better reason than that’s what I discovered first.
But I read the first issue, months back, before I ever saw an episode of the show. And the problems I had with the 11 issues after were on display from the get-go, if to a lesser extent. I wasn’t too impressed then. And I think the TV show had some problems too.
So I think it’s fair to say I just disliked the comic for being the comic.
Lots of people really like it, though, so maybe I’m just a crank.
You might try Z. A. Recht’s ‘Plague of the Dead.’ It’s a regular novel, and I’m only about halfway through, but it’s quite good. Zombies, of course. Lots of zombies.