A curmudgeon writes.
The Walking Dead Compendium 4 by Robert Kirkman.
My rating: 5 of 5 stars.
So this is where it all ends. The final instalment in the saga of The Walking Dead, in which a bunch of favourites will die, and the world will go on.
Or will it?
Continue reading “Book review: The Walking Dead Compendium 4”
The Walking Dead Compendium 3 by Robert Kirkman.
My rating: 5 of 5 stars.
Another volume of blood, guts and inter-community negotiation.
Yep, it’s time for another tranche of The Walking Dead.
This compendium gathers together issues 97 – 144 of the comic series, and for the first time the stakes seem a lot higher, at least to me. There’s a sense of community throughout this volume, a feeling that there’s a world beyond just surviving. It also takes place at a period long enough after the outbreak of whatever it was that caused the dead to walk, so you know that anyone who’s bad at this point is going to be really fucking bad. Continue reading “Book review: The Walking Dead Compendium 3”
The Walking Dead Compendium 2 by Robert Kirkman.
My rating: 5 of 5 stars.
Time to break up the novels with another chunk of rotting flesh. This, the second compendium of Walking Dead survivalist gore, gathers issues 49 to 96 of the series. And let’s just say that the stories within are, well, weirder than the first.
How weird? Well, there’s more serious injury, a bit of cannibalism, accidental deaths (as opposed to on-purpose walker offing), intentionally painful murders, sniper-blown fingers, overrun compounds, threesome suggestions, killer kids and ghost phones.
I mean, it’s not as if reanimated corpses are novel any more, right? Continue reading “Book review: The Walking Dead Compendium 2”
The Walking Dead Compendium 1 by Robert Kirkman.
My rating: 5 of 5 stars.
After last year’s surprise conclusion, I figured it was probably time to check out The Walking Dead. I mean, it’s the source material for the TV show of the same name (which seems to be no closer to ending than ever), and a bunch of video games.
Luckily, the series’ publisher has released a number of compendiums – four in total – which collected huge chunks of the narrative in sequence, in 1100-page whoppers, echoing the Cerebus books in knee-breaking size.
Good job I’m reading on a tablet, then. Continue reading “Book review: The Walking Dead Compendium 1”
Outcast, Vol. 1: A Darkness Surrounds Him by Robert Kirkman
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
This volume gathers together the first six issues of Outcast, a still-ongoing comic written by Robert Kirkman and illustrated by Paul Azaceta. It’s getting variable reviews, which I suspect are largely because of its author: for a while now, Kirkman (the creator of The Walking Dead in case you’re visiting our planet) has been considered kind of untouchable. And so, the tall poppy thing comes in.
(Cue record-skip noise. Here’s where I point out that I don’t know Kirkman’s work on The Walking Dead except from the TV show, which wore thin for me a couple of seasons ago. The best thing associated with the franchise, I believe, are Telltale’s great run of tie-in adventure games (the third, not so much), but this is open to revision when I finally get around to reading the omnibus versions of the work. Got it? Good.) Continue reading “Book review: Outcast, Vol. 1: A Darkness Surrounds Him”
Yeah nah. 