Product Description: Life in the prison starts to get interesting for Rick Grimes and the rest of our survivors. Relationships heat up, fizzle out, and change entirely almost overnight. By the end of this volume, relationships between key characters are radically changed, setting the stage for future events in TheWalking Dead.
Incredible zombie series Amazing writing and drawing. The focus on human society and how it is affected by the zombie plague is especially entertaining and insightful. Smart and a lot of fun to read.
Why Do You Build Me Up? At best, "The Walking Dead" is a mediocre comic with bad moments and good moments written by a less-than-competent writer and pencilled by an artist whose panels range from good to pretty bad. At worst, it's a piece of sexist trash trying to pass for an epic, character-driven series. Which do I think it is? Recently, I'm leaning towards the latter, but I think the overall series is somewhere in-between.
"The Heart's Desire," the fourth volume of this series, has a better story than the previous installment. The dialogue remains horrible, reducing the majority of the characters to one-dimension exposition machines, but at least there was some promising bits of story. There's a new--and possibly crazy--woman who arrives and stirs up some muck between some characters, Rick is pressed to make a pretty rough decision early on (which has some backlash), and the 'mythology' of this zombie-infested world and how the infection works is explored a little bit. It was always--as usual--very easy to put down, which really isn't a good sign, but there was less stuff to get frustrated over. It actually seemed as if Kirkman had decided to stop giving every single issue an archaic and sexist spin...
...until the final issue included in this volume.
In the final issue, (don't worry, this isn't a spoiler) the team decides to form a committee of four people who will make all the decisions. All four people are men. That bugged me, but I thought Kirkman was about to save himself and make a statement AGAINST sexism (which has been a HUGE issue in the series so far) when a character says, "No women?" But how does Kirkman justify this decision? The women didn't want to be involved in the decision making. They just want to be protected. I don't know what era this man thinks he's living in, but things don't work that way. He's trying to make a statement that if the world was taken over by flesh-eating monsters, that men would assume the role of the "decision makers" and that women would simply knit and watch the children, as the women of "The Walking Dead" do.
Not only will this bother women who read this, it will bother anyone who has a problem with sexism. Period. At this point, I'm not even sure if I can continue reading this.
4/10
Best Non-Super Hero Comic! Amazingly, this series is not about zombies. It is about the end of the world and how the remaining humans struggle to survive in this distopia. Not since "Lord of the Flies" have we seen or read about the baser nature of humanity, once modern technology and institutions are removed. If you are a fan of "Lost" or "Battlestar Galactica", you will love "The Walking Dead". Start with "Volume 1" and enjoy!
love it You know, this series may have its flaw, but after all is said and done, its really good. The artwork is a beautiful black and white, shadows just come alive. The story is a human one, though grounded in this apocalyptic world. It's dark. It's edgy. It's pretty great.
Series stays strong. Robert Kirkman, The Walking Dead: The Heart's Desire (Image, 2006)
Kirkman unleashes the fourth installment in his Walking Dead comic series, and as we've come to expect from Kirkman, it's of high quality. When we last left our intrepid band of travelers, they were o the verge of being forced out of the safety they'd found in the prison by an inmate with a grudge against society. Rick's method of solving the problem, and the way he reacts to other, more mundane, stresses that occur amongst the members of the band, makes him-- and those around him-- start to question, if not his sanity, at least his fitness to lead. Kirkman's doing a fine job with this series, and I'm very much looking forward to the next installment. *** ½
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