The Walking Dead #84 (2011)

The Walking Dead #84
Writer: Robert Kirkman
Penciler: Charlie Adlard
Inker: Cliff Rathburn

(This issue was published just a few months prior to the second season of AMC's The Walking Dead television show and is collected in the No Way Out (Vol. 14) trade paperback. The success of the television show has spurred already strong sales for the comic. The Walking Dead topped the 2012 charts for individual issues and TPB sales.)

In a comic that is known for its big moments (and the elimination of main characters) and turning points (and the elimination of main characters), this issue has several elements that define Robert Kirkman's long-form storytelling.

Ostensibly a horror comic, a zombie comic, The Walking Dead is less about the undead and more about Man's inhumanity to Man (and women...and children...and cats, etc.). Sure, "roamers" and "lurkers" walk the Earth in search of warm, delicious human flesh, but Kirkman's story is really about how we treat each other, desperate or otherwise.

Officer Rick Grimes has awoken from a gun-shot induced coma to find the world overrun by the undead and his family missing. The preceding 83 issues chronicle the lengths he will go, the depths to which he will sink, to protect his family as the reluctant leader of a rag-tag bunch of survivors. Rick is forced to make the tough decisions and do the dirty work no one else is willing to do to ensure the safety of the group. Along the way, his behavior raises questions about his own humanity and sanity - questions they are fortunate enough to ponder because he has helped them survive to do so.

Issue #83 finds Rick and the other residents of Alexandria back in desperation mode, as their (until recently) safe haven is being overrun by a herd of walkers. Mr. Kirkman sets us up with a devastating accident and Mr. Adlard puts the "graphic" in graphic depiction. We are left with a haunting cliffhanger (pictured at right).

Issue #84 picks up as Rick turns to the community's doctor to save his son, Carl, while the very community itself is being threatened right outside her door. Rick is at a crossroads - a situation he has found himself in several times before - and it is up to him to make the desperate play. He heads back out into the undead herd to save the community so the community can save his son.

There are several payoffs to this unselfish, and undoubtedly foolish, act. Kirkman has pushed his protagonist into extreme situations before to explore the nature of a hero by seeing how far he is willing to go to do what he believes is right. Rick has committed horrible acts in the name of safety and security. Others have questioned his methods and, at times, his sanity (as recently as issue #81), but in the end they have come around because...well...they're still alive, aren't they? The community was understandably skeptical of Rick upon the group's introduction to the community. Over time, they came to respect his survival instincts and eye for seeing potential threats - qualities his own group learned to admire and depend upon for over a year "out there." So, as Rick (joined by his right-hand undead-dispatching deputies Michonne and Abraham) hacks and slashes with every ounce of desperation he can muster, the people of the community bear witness to his heroism and emerge from hiding to help the group reclaim what few streets they claim as their home. And Adlard's splash page is blood-and-guts-soaked black-and-white goodness:

Dead. They're all dead...uh...again.

After the badassery subsides and the collective breath is caught and the magnitude of their victory sinks in, we also get a shift in the direction of the book (although, in a bit of heavy-handed dialogue). Rick gets two full pages to explain what it took him 83 2/3 issues to realize: people are the problem, not the zombies. And as such, he's done running. He's figured out a way to deal with the dead, the walking dead, and vows to see the community reclaimed and revitalized. This is one of the reasons that I enjoy Kirkman's writing so much - devoting this kind of time, putting his characters through so much, only to find to that the lessons learned are not an end, but the beginning of a new direction.

Awwwwwwwwwww...

Rick's epiphany would make a fine and dandy resolution on Freytag's triangle of narrative structure, but that would ignore the success of the t.v. show and the potential to sell hundreds of thousands of more comics and trade paperbacks and action figures and t-shirts and such. It also ignores Carl's life in the balance, the emotional and physical aftermath of this unthinkable attack, and a world full of mindless, unceasing, flesh-eating threats just outside the crumbling wall. Fortunately, Kirkman and Adlard had an inkling that this little black-and-white comic might just work and have forged ahead with additional comics and tv shows (Season 3.5 returns to AMC on Feb. 10th and, as of this review, there are at least another 23 issues to peruse). After all, there are walls to rebuild and relationships to restore and lives to resume (Carl? Maybe? C'mon, Kirkman! You wouldn't kill a kid, would you? What do you mean, issues 15 and 61?).

If you aren't reading The Walking Dead, you should be. It's gutty, gritty, gory goodness (and that's just the living characters). Mature readers only.

Re-Leaf Review:
5 Severed Zombie Heads (out of 5)