Book 45: The Walking Dead, Compendium 1, by Robert Kirkman

I've come back around to the graphic novel genre and decided to catch up a bit with the Walking Dead series.  Of course, I'm a fan of the show and I'd read a few of the comics quite a while ago but I was quickly approaching the point where the show would catch up to my reading.  I saw that this compendium was on sale on Amazon for about $30 and it contains the first 48 issues of the comic.  I quickly picked it up and am now reading through them.  It's about 1000 pages but illustrations take up quite a bit of the page.  The series is now around issue 96 so we should see another compendium any time now containing the next 48 issues.

1008 pages means 144 gory, violent pages per day.  Can't wait...


REVIEW:   Holy crap.  This book is a real rollercoaster of emotions.  Never have I been so affected by a comic.  In the beginning, you have a sense of hope and optimism as Rick explores this new world in search of his family.  Very soon, however, things start to get more and more complex and more and more dark.  But let's start with the good stuff.

The art in the book is amazing.  There are great depictions of zombies and they are so detailed that you can tell what they were before the apocalypse from the details of their clothing, etc.  The characters and settings are also equally detailed which adds a lot of realism to the book.  Some of the individual drawings, in particular, a couple of the two-page spreads are works of art.

As good as the art was, however, the story really takes the prize.  The realism of the settings is echoed with the plight of the survivors.  They are reduced to a nomadic lifestyle, struggling to find food and survive against bitter odds.  As soon as someone lets down their guard, they die.  Ultimately, the story ends up being less about zombies and more about what happens to society when the morals and laws of civilization are lost.  It's an epic story and and both the story and art heighten the experience.  Roads choked with abandoned cars, the ruins of suburban housing tracts, empty hospitals and prisons, etc. really bring home the state of the world.

It is also, however, a seriously depressing book.  Following all these people through their troubles and learning to understand their individual situations only to have them killed a few issues down the road is demoralizing.  You feel as the survivors feel, that maybe it's not worth making connections when any of them could die at any time.

Overall, I will definitely pick up the series again (it's already on issue #98) but it will take a little while to get over the trauma of this book.  It's depressing to see the world crumble around you only to watch it built back up through painstaking effort only to have it crumble again worse than before.  It's a masterpiece of human drama in extraordinary circumstances just for the emotional rollercoaster Kirkman takes us on.

9 out of 10.

Book 33: The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen by Alan Moore and Kevin O'Neill

I'm cheating again and still haven't finished Pasternak in Russian.  However, in order to try to keep up with the project I'm reading another book over the weekend.  This time it's a graphic novel, actually a collection of graphic novels consisting of the first two volumes of the comic with 6 issues in each volume.  Since so many films, etc. are based on comics and graphic novels these days I thought I would try to work in a few to round out my reading.  There are no page numbers in this book, but it looks to be about 250-270 pages and I should be able to finish within 2-3 days.

REVIEW:  I really wanted the movie version of this to be good but it really just wasn’t.  I figured that, maybe, the source material would be better and there I wasn’t disappointed.  This omnibus version of the material contains the first two volumes along with a couple of prose stories in between them.  Each volume contains six of the original issues. 

The story revolves around a group of literary “superheroes” for lack of a better word.  The League consists of 5 characters, Mina Harker from Dracula, Allan Quatermain from King Solomon’s Mines, Dr. Jeckyll and his alter-ego, Hawley Griffin a.k.a. the Invisible Man and Captain Nemo (do I really need to tell you what where he’s from?).  The five “superheroes” band together to help the government of England defeat some of the biggest challenges facing it.

It’s an interesting concept, and the main characters are not the only ones from fictional sources to be included.  There are characters galore from Edgar Rice Burroughs, Edgar Allan Poe, Jules Verne, H.G. Wells, H.P. Lovecraft and many, many others both famous and obscure.  In fact, it was sort of a side-game for me to try to identify even minor characters and their sources. 

I did have a couple of problems with the book.  The ending of the second volume is a little unsatisfying, but that’s not really a big deal.  My main problem is with the two main protagonists, Mina Murray (Harker) and Allan Quatermain.  It seemed to me that neither one of them really did much of anything.  Quatermain was aghast at just about everything that happens and behaves rather cowardly most of the time.  Mina tries to keep the group focused and is, supposedly the brains of the operation, but she doesn’t really do anything either.  Quatermain is supposed to be a great hunter but doesn’t shoot anything and Mina is, supposedly, a vampire but never even defends herself when attacked.  All the real action is left to the other three members of the League.

Overall, the story moves at a good pace, the art is good and the plot is interesting.  It was definitely much better than the film.  Of the two prose sections, the first is a prologue about Allan Quatermain and was relatively interesting, but the second is a sort of travelogue of the world showing how full of random literary places and people it is.  Somehow that failed to be interesting and came across as kind of dry. 

7 out of 10.