Meandering: The Walking Dead #105 Review

We’re a bunch of issues into the Negan Is A Douchebag arc in The Walking Dead, and I still don’t have that douchebag figured out yet.

I know a few people with some experience dealing with people on the autism spectrum (I know, I know: “Gee Rob, doesn’t everyone who knows you have experience dealing with at least one guy on the autism spectrum?” Yer a real fucking comedian, you are), and I’ve heard enough descriptions of missed social cues and inappropriate responses to interpersonal stimuli and the need for rigid routine to think that maybe writer Robert Kirkman intends for Negan to be rocking that kind of diagnosis… although everything I know about autism comes from secondhand anecdotes, Rainman and when people question my motivations.

But at the same time, I know a rotten, cowardly fucking bully when I see one, an I certainly see one in Negan. A big kid in arrested development who realized somewhere along the way that, since there’s no one to put the arm on him for telling racist jokes and flushing drunks heads down the toilet, why the hell not escalate to baseball bats and hot irons?  Maybe Negan’s just the kid who wedgied you in junior high who’s stuck in a state of arrested development, taking advantage of the fact that he maybe pinkbellied his first couple of “followers” into line, and the rest followed the pack.

Or maybe Kirkman has some combination of the two in mind; a character who never had the capacity to understand that just because a littler kid didn’t hit you back didn’t mean he was your friend, who thrives in a black-and-white set of simple rules that he suddenly found himself in a position to create on his own (no matter how much sense those rules might make), and whose pre-apocalypse personal obsession was zombie movies which made him better prepared to handle the rise of the walkers while we other social outcasts who were obsessed with, say, comic books, contributed to the rise of the new world order by becoming lunch.

Or maybe I’m completely full of shit, utterly off base, and have no idea what I’m talking about. And even if I am, who gives a damn? I don’t need the DSM-5 to know batshit crazy when I see it, and Negan is crazy. Regardless of his motivations (although clearly, this is the kind of thing that’s on my mind these days), this issue serves to show that, back at the ranch, Negan is at least as dangerous as the Governor, if not more so due to his obvious lack of real care for his people. He needs to die, already… and he has Carl.

This will not end well… and frankly, after six or seven months with this prick, I’m not sure it will end at all.

He’s Dead Tired: The Walking Dead #103 Review

I am not going to recommend that you read The Walking Dead #103 as an individual issue for two reasons. The first being that this issue is all setup for seeing the gang’s nemesis, Negan, eventually take his rotten barbed wire-wrapped baseball bat, Lucille, somewhere south of Tainthattan (and that is, by the way, my official prediction as to what happens to the greasy bastard).

The second reason is that, since this is all setup for that inevitable, yet eventual, beatdown, it is an issue designed to make us hate Negan even more than we already did for killing Glenn. Which means that we spend 22 pages here watching Negan be a colossal asshole and get away with it. Which will make Negan’s inevitable defeat all the sweeter, but seen on its own, as an individual issue?

God damn, what a bummer.

They Just Seem A Little Weird: The Walking Dead #102 Review

God, The Walking Dead has been a king bummer recently. And I know that’s a hell of a thing to say about a book that has shown in its nine-year history that anyone can die at any time for any – or no – reason at all, but its the truth. Over the past couple of years, we’ve gotten used to seeing Rick and the gang moving from being barely-surviving victims, constantly on the edge of being wiped out, to bad motherfuckers who are not only not to be trifled with, but who damn well know it. It’s been like watching Walter White turn into Heisenberg, only with less mouthy teen using “bitch” as a comma, and no Skyler fucking everything up for everybody.

That all went sideways in issue #100, when Negan took Glenn out with a baseball bat and apparently turned Rick into a simpering pansy. So we’ve spent a couple of months watching people grieve, and Rick apparently coming to terms with the fact that he and his people are about to become bitches for Negan and his Saviors, all while his people are generally whipping themselves up into a screeching hate frenzy to do some revenge murder, utterly unaware that Rick has committed to standard divorce terms: he got fucked, and now he has to give up half his shit and smile about it.

And as in any divorce, there comes a day when you have to tell the kids that their lives about about to inexorably turn to shit because Mommy and Daddy can’t get along. And The Walking Dead #102 is that issue, the time when Rick’s people must come to terms with the fact that they are forever doomed to laboring on behalf of aggressors who they can never defeat, and for whom Rick, who has always protected them, has no idea how to overcome.

Kinda.

Walking Centennial: Walking Dead #100

Since Rob and Amanda are off in San Diego, risking life and limb dodging furries and trying desperately to avoid the dreaded ConSARS, they’ve asked me to write up my thoughts on Kirkman’s centennial issue of the Walking Dead.

Last night I caught up on the last several issues of The Walking Dead in preparation my review of issue 100, and, after reading through the past few books I was disappointed to find:

• Carl still won’t stay in the fucking house
• A stranger appears with a too-good-to-be-true offer from a nearby community
• This community, it could change everything, they could have lives again!
• Rick opts to tie up the stranger instead of putting an e-fence shock collar on Carl

It reminded me of daytime soaps and their lather, rinse, repeat storylines; though here it’s even less surprising when a character comes back from the dead. As I finished up #99, I found myself growing tired of the repetitiveness, and yet still eager to read issue 100, hoping for an interesting turn rather than more of the same.

Spoilers Ahead

The Posing Dead: Kirkman Publishes Walking Dead’s Michonne’s Origin In Playboy

When it comes to The Walking Dead, the closest thing that comic book has to a superhero is Michonne.

First appearing in The Walking Dead #19 by just wandering up in front of the prison where Rick and crew had taken refuge (Whoops; spoiler alert for people who only watch the AMC TV show! But if you’re one of those people, quick fucking around and go buy the comics, already). She’s a badass, katana-swinging ninja with a killer’s heart, an imaginary friend and Jack Bauer’s sense of justice. And most interestingly, she has a hazy, ambiguous past. Writer Robert Kirkman has truly made Michonne The Walking Dead’s Man With No Name.

Michonne’s origin has been long-awaited by fans of The Walking Dead, and probably by people like my Local Comic Store Owner, who knows me by name and asks me to stop calling him The Governor, because there’s a good chance that that story would get people who normally only buy the trade collections of The Walking Dead to also buy that individual issue.

Well, Robert Kirkman has announced that our waiting is over. Yesterday he announced that he will be publishing Michonne’s origin story. With art by regular penciler Charlie Adlard. And it’s available today.

In Playboy Magazine.

Wait, what?

Impending Doom: The Walking Dead #94 Review

Well, Andrea’s dead.

Oh, not literally; at the end of The Walking Dead #94, she’s still walking around, hovering around Rick now that they’ve hooked up, vowing that she won’t leave his side and leaving him filled with apprehension for her safety and us filled a feeling that Andrea must have a hair trigger to be this involved with a man with no dominantly coordinated hand. Either that, or that Colt pistol isn’t the only Python that Rick’s packing. But I’m digressing already.

The point is that early in this issue, Andrea says something that feels so much like the kind of line someone says in a horror movie right before they’re run through by Jason Voorhees that I immediately thought that she might was well be wearing an “Eat Me (Not You Rick)” t-shirt. It’s the kind of thing that any savvy horror movie fan would take to mean that it’s time to butch up on your bladder control, because someone’s about to get butchered. In other hands, it would be an amateur’s move… but in writer Robert Kirkman’s, it feels like it serves an important purpose. That purpose being that these characters feel indestructible. And, considering they are still living in the middle of a zombie apocalypse, they should probably stop doing that.

Right There On The Shelf: The Walking Dead #89 Review

EDITOR’S NOTE: This review may contain spoilers. Such as the fact that zombies have taken over the world. Tread lightly.

There’s been a lot of handwringing in the comics / zombie community (Which is a small community, but they throw great parties… except at the end your dick rots off. And not because of the zombie thing. But I digress.) about how AMC fired The Walking Dead showrunner Frank Darabont – about a week after he hyped season two at SDCC, no less – and how that and threatened budget cuts meant that the The Walking Dead was doomed.

And as someone who watched that show from the first episode and who bought season one on Blu-Ray the day it came out, allow me to go on record to say: who gives a shit?

Sure, the show is fun, and anything that puts comic stories in front of Joe Blow can only be good for the industry (Ghost Rider movies excepted), but the show was only ever second fiddle to Robert Kirkman’s original comic book. And if you’ve ever seen the show and you haven’t checked out the comic book? Well, that’s stupid. And you’re stupid for not doing it.