The final quarter of The Walking Dead’s second Compendium is up next to be reviewed and with it… some pretty chill volumes, it has to be said. In fact Volume 15 barely has any action in it at all as its once again focused on the Alexandria community coming together post-crisis and then a small mutiny. At least 16 introduces the Hilltop community and does something a little different. Still, we all know what Compendium 3 is full of, but that’ll have to wait until later in the year, so let’s finish this chunk of Walking Dead comic first, shall we?

Another double bill of Walking Dead comic volumes and once again it’s mostly setting the scene of Alexandria being a new safe haven with no more outside groups to deal with (oh how wrong they turn out to be…) but that’s not to say it doesn’t have its moments, especially involving the, well, walking dead. Let’s take a look!

It’s time for another chunk of black and white Walking Dead goodness (well, in terms of storytelling, not so much tone…) as we get some dramatic send-offs and some horrifying moments before we reach the all-too-familiar (for those of us who watched the TV show first) location of Alexandria. Let’s take a look!

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!

(Note: This was written a few months ago so it’s still in the old review format. Oh well, at least all of Omnibus 1 will match!) Never before has a title rang quite as true as Volume 7 “The Calm Before” because, yeah… Volume 8 is a hell of a thing, that’s for sure. It’s no wonder the comic fans at the time were so upset with how the finale of the Prison story arc was handled at the end of Season 3, and even when they tried to recoup it in 4. It’s nothing like the shocking sudden onslaught that happens here… So let’s take a look!

(Anime on a Monday and a comic review on Friday?! Stupid review embargo!) My first look through the Walking Dead comics has brought me to the Governor and his Woodbury settlement, something that was a bit of a mess in the TV show and it turns out is a mess in the comics as well, just in a very different and far more literal way! Let’s take a look, then, but not too long of a look because yikes, some panels in these pages were quite the sight…

The next two volumes of The Walking Dead comic see the group set up in the Prison but things go quite differently than it did in the later TV adaptation as they really push the idea of the human survivors butting heads in a new world without law and what that means. It’s really good stuff and tonally very different from what I know as the show. It’s starting to seem like the people praising the comics may have been on to something…

So for many years I’ve been seeing people say or being directly told that the original comic version of The Walking Dead is far better than the TV series, and frankly in recent years I have been wondering “what was this story like with Rick still in it?” so I’ve taken the plunge and brought the first compendium, though I’ll be reviewing them in batches of two volumes rather than all eight that made up the mammoth book at once… that would take some time to review! So let’s look at the original comic version of events, both the opening story and the Hershel farm part as well (they really stretched that one in the TV series didn’t they?)