Picking up where we left off with the Walking Dead comic reviews is the start of the second Compendium, or specifically Volumes 9 and 10 overall, and after the insanity of the previous chunk that saw the Prison fall and more character deaths then you can shake a stick at we have several issues of dealing with the trauma of those events before we meet up with a familiar trio of people in Abraham, Eugene and Rosita. Let’s take a look!
The first few issues see Rick and Carl coming to terms with the loss of their mother/wife and new born daughter/sister as well as Rick recovering from his bullet wound. Carl eventually sees his father as weak and thinks he can look after himself but after a close call and a moment where he thinks his father is dead he changes his mind and the two become close again. There is also a disturbing few scenes where Rick is talking to a woman down a phone and it turns out to be Lori, or in reality just all in Rick’s head, something he confirms by pulling the phone out of its socket and still being able to hear her. After a while Michonne manages to meet back up with them and then the trio meet up with Glenn and Maggie, so the Prison survivors decide to head back to the Farm to meet any of the others, which they do! Despite all the chaos there are still plenty of recognisable faces alive… for now.
“No! Why don’t YOU open it! … Oh yeah, right. Sorry Dad.”
It’s funny seeing them return to the Farm post- Prison given how different it is from the show (I know I say this each review but as a reminder: I watched the TV show before reading the comics, I’m aware these came first!), but things soon became more familiar for me as Abraham, Rosita and Eugene arrive and ask for supplies as they’re heading to Washington because Eugene knows what started the outbreak and needs escorting. Obviously people like Andrea and Rick don’t trust them but eventually as a group they decide to accompany them and help their “important mission”, leaving the Farm behind.
The group get on the road and here there are some really great moments between Rick and Abraham. Ignoring Rick still talking down the phone to Lori after having pulled it from the wall and put it in his backpack he is beginning to find himself again but is clashing with Abraham’s more “shoot first” method of leadership, especially when Maggie attempts to hang herself after the death of her entire family at the Prison was a bit much and Abraham tries to shoot her straight away leading to Rick pointing a gun at him instead. It all comes to naught as Maggie begins to breathe again but the two later express the willingness to kill each other should they start pointing guns around again. Later though Rick is approached by a zombie without any way to fighting back and Abraham hesitates to save him, though does eventually and then cries about it later saying he started off pointing at Rick. Lots of manly grandstanding but also showing both as very human people, it’s good drama.
Despite all that’s already happened, “Just the beginning” is probably still accurate, yeah…
Maggie takes a while to want to talk to anyone, her husband included, but you know… surprised it doesn’t happen more often in the zombie post-apocalypse. I’ll leave the rest for the Spoiler section but it’s a really entertaining chunk of the story (in a grim and realistic depiction of people living in a hellish apocalypse sort of way, anyway…)
Overall Thoughts:
You know it’s bad when slicing a skull in two is now an action so mundane you don’t even have an exclamation mark at the end of your soundeffect.
The Walking Dead’s original comic story once again shows how well it handles the actual human drama of this kind of bizarre situation while also throwing in some tense and often gruesome scenes as well. A perfect follow up to the craziness of the previous volume.
On the way to Washington Rick realises he can stop by his old home town, take some supplies from the local police station and check in on Morgan, so he, Carl and Abraham go as a group, with Michonne promising to look for them if they’re not back in three days. On the way there they’re assaulted by bandits who threaten to… ahem, do things to Carl in front of a downed Rick but our protagonist gets up and actually bites the neck of his assailant and kills the other one, with Abraham finishing off the third. That night Abraham comes clean that he also killed people brutally in a fit of rage when early in the fall he went out for supplies and came back to find his wife and daughter had been… um, again, er… taken advantage of by the people he thought were his friends while his son watched, but afterwards his family were afraid of him due to his actions and ran. He later found them dead or zombified and had to re-kill them, so… Bloody hell. No wonder he’s a bit… off mentally. Still, at least Rick and Abraham have bonded now!
Yikes! I guess when Rick announced “THEY were the walking dead” he really meant it…
They make it to Morgan’s and find his son had died and he chained him to the floor unable to kill him, but he eventually leaves with our lead trio after claiming to have put his son to rest (but actually just freed him). They get some guns and supplies and head out but come across a herd of thousands of zombies and eventually lead them back to the core group after a plan to lure them away with house appliances fails. Dale is pissed off that Rick has put them in danger again and makes this fact known to Andrea…
Hogan Reviews 