Highway 62

But I gotta get it off my chest.

I'm dropping The Walking Dead. After a little more than two years of being behind the book, though that support has waned in the last eight months or so, I'm done. There's only so much of one man's gradual descent into depression and paranoia I can take. There's only so much daytime soap opera antics I'm gonna lay three bucks on the line for. There's only so much "WE ARE THE WALKING DEAD" I'm gonna stomach.

Particularly when there's no goddamn zombies to give the book any real teeth. The second the survivors stopped moving and were able to stand around bickering was the moment I should have run screaming away from the book at top speed. That's inevitably the moment that any zombie flick turns the corner from pants-wettingly scary to "CAN WE PLEASE GET ON WITH IT?" Even the awesome remake of Dawn of the Dead suffered from this. But at least it offered some real gruesome scares with the pregnant zombie scene and the blackout in the middle of that, as well as the story of hapless Andy the gun store owner.

I've said for a long time that The Walking Dead wasn't a horror book, or even a zombie book, and for a long time I was okay with that. I'm not really so okay with that anymore. The last arc pretty much had me hoping for something better in every subsequent issue. That something better never showed up. It's too bad. Micchone could have been something really great to shake up the whole works. You know, some punctuated equillibrium. But lately it's all been equillibrium and no punctuation. Yeah, the tension between Rick and Tyrese was supposed to be the punctuation, and instead it completely misfired and became "how unsympathetic can we make Rick and still have the reader give a damn?" For me, that equation got tipped into "too unsympathetic" a long time ago. There's a long way between being ruthlessly pragmatic and being a robot about such.

It's a shame. The first twelve issues were really solid, and I firmly count Charlie Adlard's work as of equal quality to Tony Moore's. I dunno, maybe I'll come back to things once we break out of the microcosm of the prison and get a look at the larger world. But that's always a dangerous corner to turn, particularly when you're dealing with claustrophobic horror as your stock in trade. Who knows, it may very well inject some vitality into the book, but for now, I'm done.

Not with zombies altogether. Hell, I've got a project that I think would make for a great longform limited series, which would probably get lumped into the zombie horror category, though it really isn't. And there would be a lot of very different stuff, stuff you never see in these sorts of things (probably because I'm not taking Romero's opus as gospel.)

Ah, there I go again, tooting my own horn. I'll stop now.

I wish Mr. Kirkman and Mr. Adlard and Mr. Rathburn the best of luck with their continued success on the book. It looks like the audience is stable and not really going anywhere, which for a non-superhero book is still something to celebrate. Just that I won't be along for the ride.