The Walking Dead Book 2 by Robert Kirkman

After reading The Walking Dead Book One I found myself hooked into this series.  I had never gotten in to the TV show, but there was something about this story that made me want to keep reading.

While book one focuses heavily one the society before and after and how things have changed between the two, book two takes a different path and looks at the extremes people can be pushed to in the right (wrong?) circumstances.  

The rule that really put all of this into focus for me was Rick saying, "You kill, you die."  He yelled this in anger response to a mad man killing off two twin girls, which means he hadn't thought about the meaning of what he was saying.  This is shown very soon when he is forced to kill a man who is kicking them out of their current home.  If he had not done this, then all of his family and friends would have been forced into the outside world and most likely killed quickly.  Rick comes face to face with this face again when his best friend Tyreese kills his daughter's boyfriend Chris after Chris shot her in a mercy killing.  Rick seems to be okay with this murder, just not in the way it was so emotionally done.  He rules by picking and choosing which killing is okay and which is against the rules.  The other murder he doesn't mention in all of this is when his son Carl killed his friend Shane in order to save his own life.  This would have been an interesting topic to add to the comic as Carl and Rick would have both had to face the wrongness of Carl's actions, even if it did save Rick's life.  By the end Rick has changed his tune, because he has realized himself that this rule means nothing.

Rick making these choices for everyone is reminiscent of an old time sheriff in the wild west, and I think the author chose his career as a policeman just to help make this comparison.  Rick follows his own moral compass, but as he is driven out of his humanity that compass may no longer point towards good.  It will be interesting to watch him slip in the future and how that will affect his leadership.

-Amanda

The Walking Dead —Robert Kirkman and Tony Moore (Graphic Novel)

After reading the Walking Dead graphic novel one of the biggest things I noticed was how quickly and easily it was for some people to transition into this new life and yet difficult for others.  Rick jumped right into this new weirdness and was ready to take on the zombies, while other characters like Shane seemed to hold onto the idea that the world was going to one day go back to how it was.

Weird is anything out of the normal.  Normal changes; for us it is the tradition of living in a home or apartment, going to school or work, paying bills, worrying about the future, and just being a person in society.  In the graphic novel The Walking Dead we would call their lives weird because it does not fit into our normal, even though that has become their normal.

The graphic novel follows a few families that have been brought together in the event of a zombie apocalypse.  There are many trials for them to overcome together, and like all good zombie stories a lot of death and blood.  In the novel, there are a few different things that would appear as weird to us but have become these people's every day.

The first, and most obvious, is the zombies.  Through the first part of the book they live near Atlanta which is completely overtaken by the walking dead; a few of the people make journeys into town to get supplies.  They also have a few "roamers" as they are called.  Random zombies will walk into their camp on the daily and they have to be stopped.  Having a zombie walk into your home or show up at your grocery store would be extremely weird.  The characters often get killed off by these zombies.  They have grown used to being around them, and have transformed their lives into something new in order to live with them around.

Another thing that I found weird was the things the people worried about.  Of course, everyone had concerns about their dead family members, where food was coming from, and staying safe but there were other smaller things that bothered people too.  The character Glen was concerned about dying a virgin. One of the mothers was more concerned about who the neighbor was sleeping with than her own children.  Lori was concerned when they ran out of pears because she didn't like peaches.  It was an odd juxtaposition to have these trivially human concerns against the backdrop of the destroyed and diseased country.

-Amanda

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