The Walking Dead
The Walking Dead is not one franchise but three — Telltale’s episodic adventure games, AMC’s TV show and, of course, Robert Kirkman’s comic book series, the granddaddy of them all. It’s entirely possible to be a fan of one these ongoing series and not the others. Most people probably are.
Despite the fact that all three series take place in (roughly) the same universe, each has come to mean something different within its respective medium. The Walking Dead franchise in all its incarnations winds up representing zombie fiction at its worst and its best.
The Walking Dead games make up one of the most exciting video game series out there. Few video games have matched the richness of the storytelling or character building, while even fewer have managed to create the illusion of determinism as successfully.
The game’s scope is the narrowest of the franchise, but it offers the most emotional experience of the bunch. Its second season even offers something rarely seen in zombie canon: a coming-of-age story set against the zombie apocalypse.
The Walking Dead TV series takes a similarly character-centric approach to storytelling but with much less success. Maybe it’s simply a consequence of context: the Walking Dead games don’t have as much competition as the TV series does.
On AMC alone, The Walking Dead lives under the shadow of Mad Men and Breaking Bad. While the writing isn’t necessarily bad, the TV series isn’t great at making a case for its characters.
While the game can smooth over rough patches in the script through compelling game design or interactive choices, the TV series just has to plod along. Earlier seasons of The Walking Dead suffered particularly from didactic writing, in which each character served only as a mouthpiece for the writers’ nihilistic thoughts of the week.
Yet the show remains the most popular part of The Walking Dead franchise and one of the most popular shows on TV. The reason is simple: People like watching zombie gore. Creative zombie kills are as ingrained into the genre as the zombies themselves.
For all its many flaws, the Walking Dead TV show has always excelled in its action scenes. Even though the budget never seems to be quite big enough, The Walking Dead the show makes the most of its zombified extras and grotesque makeup.
The Walking Dead comic books, on the other hand, feel mythic. Freed from the constraints of video game engineering and television budgets, Kirkman’s ongoing series is epic in the same way Stephen King’s The Stand was epic.
The story may involve a similar core group of characters, but the journey throughout goes to bigger and bigger places. Few works in zombie canon have considered the post apocalypse at such length.
The closest relatives to Kirkman’s comics might be George Romero’s classic film series. Alongside the satirical inquiry of Romero’s movies is an equal interest in creating a universe and a mythos.
The Walking Dead doesn’t share Romero’s enthusiasm for metaphor (zombies as consumers, zombies as the Viet Cong, zombies as terrorists), but it does share the same interest in exploring the decay of power structures and civilization through zombie apocalypse.
For more on The Walking Dead, check out Nick Gallagher’s recap of this week’s episode:
[ READ MORE: RECAP: The Walking Dead, “No Sanctuary” ]
