(I don’t read comic books. For maybe a subconscious reason I read some comic books.)

Because I was sick, because of Demonoid and the iPad, because — who knows! — I read all the Walking Dead: issues one through seventy-nine yesterday, fitfully, from three am to six am, and then from about nine am to eleven am. It was a binge that, added up looks like a good chunk of time, but in passing took none at all. If we’re being literal, though, it took me five hours, which was about the length of the entire first season of AMC’s jawn.

One of those experiences was awesome, terrifying, uplifting, and fearlessly savage. The other was fucking boring. Guess which was which.

The Waking Dead was created by this dude named Robert Kirkman. The art was by a few people. If you ask me, none of the art is that great, but some of the covers are pretty awesome.

I’ve never seen a zombie movie, except for Shaun of the Dead, so when I told my girlfriend that I was sad because I didn’t think there would be a happy ending, she was like, ‘Uhh, yeah dude. Zombie movies never have a happy ending.’ I didn’t know that.

The amazing thing about The Waking Dead, and while I think it was just categorically stupid (nay execrable) to adapt it for TV, is that it’s mostly about cliche leadership stuff. At it’s best, it’s like Lost (at its best). What puts it over the top, of course, is the situation it throws everyone into. Not only is there a full-scale breakdown of society, the loss of all commerce, and the death/impending death of all your loved ones—there’s also the ongoing play between zombie dead and human dead. That may sound like restating the preceding, but it’s not.

Grimes says at the end of one issue¹ that, Hey guys don’t you get it. WE ARE THE WALKING DEAD. Except most of the time it’s pretty clear who the zombies are. But again The Waking Dead’s brilliance is at it sets up evil on a contiuum rather than as two sides of a two-sided object.

The Waking Dead tries to uncover the origin of law, and it concludes not unlike Locke and Rousseau that it has to do with property. When you happen to be nomads primarily, your notion of property becomes radically compressed. Sometimes the only thing you own is the method in which you’d prefer to die.

The aspect of the comic that really ratchets up the thought experiment of the story is the ridiculous (comic?) level of violence and cruelty it depicts. This is one reason why the TV show always already fails. It won’t ever be a be able to depict a visceral enough horror in order to make the leadership/humanity question interesting. I mean, I’m not sure they can even depict child cannibalism, which seems to be the easiest atrocity to show without showing, if you know what I mean.

The other thing is that The Waking Dead just fucking kills people all the time, and I doubt a TV show is going to do that. But necessarily, it has to. And the Shane character is the worst, and he operates a million times better as a specter than as some douche bag² on screen. He’s easily one of the worst somewhat main characters, and the way he dies is so important to the entire story that his continued life at the end of AMC The Waking Dead season one just shows the writers failed on a very basic level.

Shane’s death is double important because (you may discover) Grimes’s son is the most interesting character in the story. (Aside from, on a purely visceral level, the samurai sword-wielding, zombie slave toting lawyer. Naturalmente.)

I don’t know. I’m doing a terrible job explaining why The Waking Dead is so good. It’s basically a civics class plus some commentary on Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics with a little The Road stirred in for flavor. But I do know that the AMC show is even more terribler when you read the comics. But I do know that, unlike my foray into the series, The AMC show paid Robert Kirkman some cash. And so I cannot be so down on it in the final analysis. But the books really are great.