By Andrew A. Smith

Tribune Content Agency

 

You love The Walking Dead on AMC. But as you watch the show, and re-watch the show, and Story Sync (for the two-screen experience!), and play the trivia games, and talk over The Talking Dead, one lingering question haunts you …

Should you be reading the comics, too?

This question comes up time and again on the Captain Comics Round Table website, and two schools of thought have emerged. One, that reading the comics tells you too much of what’s to come, and two, that they are separate storytelling experiences that, if anything, enrich each other. Both can be true, as demonstrated by two recent episodes.

In the eleventh episode of season 5, “The Distance,” a whole lot was made of very little. Rick’s group of survivors had been approached by a suspiciously clean and well-dressed stranger named Aaron who invited them to join a safe community named Alexandria. The entire episode basically hinged on the question of whether or not the group would trust this guy.

Given that just about every human they’ve met so far had tried to trick, kill and/or eat them, trusting a stranger was no given. We saw the various members express opinions, change their minds, go this way and that, each time revealing a little more of who they were at heart. All of them debated, fairly publicly, whether they could risk having hope again.

The episode never took the easy way out. Aaron was difficult for the audience to read – he worked so hard at being sincere that he came off as insincere, more corporate recruiter than apocalypse survivor. The leader, Rick, didn’t order anybody to do anything they weren’t willing to do, and no group member hurled an ultimatum to force a decision. It was a debate – a sad, scary, no-easy-answer, consequential debate.

Or so my wife told me. Because I’ve read the comics. And I know all about Aaron and Alexandria. And I knew what the group would decide. It was in the comics five years ago!

So, yeah, there was very little suspense in “The Distance” for those who read the comics. Bummer.

But, of course, it was still enjoyable. Not as profoundly enjoyable as it could have been from a position of blissful ignorance, but it was still fun to watch the characterization unfurl. And it was different than the comic book.

Because the TV show doesn’t follow the comics in lock step. Sure, it tracks with what writer Robert Kirkman has established in the comics in broad strokes – you have the Greene farm adventure, the prison sojourn, the cannibals, and now Alexandria. But within those broad strokes, there are changes a-plenty.

On TV, the Governor decapitated Hershel. In the comics, it was Tyreese who lost his head. On TV, it was Hershel who had his leg cut off, establishing that a quick amputation could save a life even after a walker bite. In the comics, it was Dale. On TV, Andrea dies in Woodbury. In the comics, she is still alive, becomes the group’s sharpshooter – and eventually becomes Rick’s significant other.  Oh, and in the comics, Daryl Dixon doesn’t exist and Rick doesn’t have a right hand.

So comics readers don’t really know what’s going to happen next on TV, not specifically. There are the occasional situations, like with Aaron, where it seems a given that the show will follow the path of the comic book fairly tightly, or the larger narrative will vary too much. But that’s pretty rare.

And no matter how loosely or tightly the comic book is adapted, there’s another angle: Television is a completely different medium. And that makes for a very powerful difference.

No matter how good the comics are – and they really are awfully good, at least through the first 100 issues – they don’t have actors. They don’t have special effects. They don’t have the sound of skulls crunching and walkers moaning. Heck, The Walking Dead comic book doesn’t even have color, except on the covers!

So the TV show can do some things that are just eye-poppingly, bloodletting-ly, nerves en-jangle-y more viscerally exciting than the comics.

Take, for example, the ninth episode of season 11, “What Happened and What’s Going On.” Once again, the basic plot is pretty simple: We watch a character die of blood loss, and experience with him the struggle to live, his final thoughts and an answer to the question viewers had as to whether this pacifist even wanted to live any more in this brutal world.  

Again, this is all new, in that the character is (spoiler alert) Tyreese, who in print died back in the Governor’s attack on the prison. But again, there isn’t much suspense, since by the Rules of the Zombie Apocalypse (walker bite without amputation = fever, then death) we know how this turns out. Sorry, Tyreese!

But in telling this one man’s struggle with both mortality and morality, the TV show had at hand techniques and technology to make this one, episode-long death scene virtually an elegy. Light bursts were used as scene-shifters and segues. Dead characters appeared in hallucinations. Music swelled or turned savage as appropriate. And, there was blood – lots and lots of the dark red stuff. Most of this is beyond the capability of a B&W comic book.

And then there’s the kicker: TV has actors. This scene in a comic book would have been pages and pages of head shots of a man talking to himself. The Tyreese of the TV show, however, had actor Chad Coleman to express the character’s pain, anger, anguish – and eventual acceptance of his fate. And Coleman had a lot to work with, because a TV show has a team of writers, whereas most comics struggle by with just one.

So comics readers, despite being pretty confident that there was a clock ticking on Tyreese, still had as much to enjoy in “What Happened and What’s Going On” as non-readers. It was a story, and an experience, which simply wouldn’t be done in comics.

Which is not to say that reading the comics is boring – far from it. The medium simply has different strengths, and stories are tailored to take advantage of them. In comics, the non-linear storytelling of “What Happened and What’s Going On” is easier to achieve, and less disorienting. Time compression and distention is simpler and more effective in print. Comics have an unlimited special effects “budget,” in that they can present spectacular scenes that are too costly for the small screen. Comics can let you know what characters are thinking. And the best part is that comics are interactive; they invite the reader to use his or her imagination to go along for the ride.

None of which answers the question of whether or not reading the comics is a plus or minus for everyone, because there isn’t a blanket answer. It’s up to the individual. If you like to be completely surprised, avoid the comics. If you want a richer experience, pick up a trade or two.

So like Rick and the gang, you have a choice. Just don’t take as long to make it.

 

Reach Captain Comics by email (capncomics@aol.com), the Internet (comicsroundtable.com), Facebook (Captain Comics Round Table) or Twitter (@CaptainComics).

 

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  • Personally, I don't have any complaints as such about the series, but I never gathered much in the way of interest for it, either.  In fact, I have pratically stopped watching television altogether.

    The comics, however, are IMO at their very best in the last three years or so.  The zombies have been all but relegated to minor background noise, leaving the good stuff of the complex personal interrelations to come to foreground.

    It is very inovative and interesting ground indeed for such a cliched genre.

    By contrast, the TV series seems to have become very much its own thing, with a very contrasting mix of characters (your description even makes Tyreese look like a completely different character from that of the comics) and, as you rightfully point out, inherently different strengths and weaknesses.  It can't possibly have quite the same depth of the comics, but it is perhaps more dramatic with what it can do.

  • I read the comics faithfully for many years (in TPB collected form), but it had some valleys even before the 100th issue. I caught up when that came out, though. And then I read the following collection (v.18) which sets up the "All Out War" story line. I found it tedious, and it stretched my credulity beyond the breaking point.

    I've got the e-book of v. 22: A New Beginning. Can anyone who has been keeping up tell me if I could just pick up the story there? Wikipedia has brief summaries that could catch me up on the broad strokes. Wouldn't surprise me if there are other resources that could give me more detail if I want spoiling.

  • I got much the opposite feeling from All Out War.  It was a much-needed breath of fresh air to me, so make of that what you will.

    In any case, "A New Beginning" is its direct sequence, but it happens after a time jump of about two years, so there are significant changes and quite a few questions hanging on the air.  The survivors are very much adapted and while there are still zombies, the story might as well have none at this point, IMO.  Nearly all of the challenges now come from dealing with other survivors and their expectations, as well as with the moral dilemmas and logistical difficulties of the new reality.

    It is very much a contrast to All Out War, and a much bigger contrast to the first 100 issues.

  • I'm not sure how to answer any of that, because I buy the "deluxe" hardcovers, and I don't know how that dovetails with the TPBs. I'll tell you where I am, and you guys can match it up.

    First: Mark, I also found some valleys in the first 100 issues. But they didn't last so long as to put me off, and they certainly weren't as long as the valleys in books like Daredevil, which I bought faithfully despite its general awfulness until Frank Miller gave it a reason to exist. So I don't give up easy.

    OK, then: I hated the death scene with a beloved character. 

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    Not so much that Glenn died, but that it was such bad writing. As I've said here before, Kirkman told the readers that Glenn needed to die because no major character had died for a while, but that the other characters in the scene couldn't die just yet because the audience was too invested in them and/or there were plans for them down the road. And Kirkman told the readers this by putting the words in Negan's mouth. That wasn't just breaking the fourth wall, it was breaking it, mailing it to Japan and pissing on it. I was taken completely out of the story, and had a hard time getting back into it. Especially since Negan had every reason in the world to kill everybody IN the scene, and there was no reason not to, but he didn't, because ... bad writing. That was it.

    And that happened about issue #100. And after that, Rick had to pretend to suck up to Negan, and let everyone hate him, because ... aw, c'mon. He didn't need to do that. Again, it was just bad writing. But he did it, and I didn't want to read it, and I had a hard time reading about it.

    That was in Deluxe HC Vol 9, and it took me a while to get into it. Then the other night, I read Vol 9 and Vol 10 together, and now we're at the point that appears to be somewhere in the middle of "All-Out War," because that's what's going on. The busty blonde chick has been

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    has been returned as a walker, and bitten the female doctor, and the Saviors were throwing hand grenades over the walls. But the gang reversed the attack and have Negan on the run. That's where Vol 10 ends, and I won't get Vol 11 for a few weeks.

    Where does that line up with the conversation you guys are having? I'll say that I'm enjoying the war a lot more than the "Rick pretends to give up" part. And I REALLY don't like Negan as a character, possibly because it irritates me how much Kirkman seems to enjoy writing him.

  • Negan is a weak character IMO.  A bit too much of a boogeyman, not completely sane, not much of a clear motivation, and for some reason pretends to be less smart than he is.  Very irritating, all things considered.

    I guess I am focusing more on the general social dynamics than in the specific characters (Rick has been worrying me for a while now, and I find him a bit of a cypher and more than a bit questionable).

    As a matter of fact, do you remember how worried we once were about the unseen Alexander Davidson, mentioned early on by Douglas in Alexandria?  

    From what we learned of him later, there are no clear lines separating him from Rick and his closest allies any more.  Abraham, particularly, was all but impossible to tell from Davidson.  And that may have been unavoidable.

    IMO The Walking Dead stumbled a bit in the first 100 issues or so to make its own path beyond the cliches of a very cliched genre (the early #50s were particularly difficult to read).  But it seems to have settled into letting go of the tired "humans vs zombies" trope and embracing the actual dynamics of how to rebuild the world after it ended, including whether it is worth the trouble at all.  

    The personal and social dynamics after the end of All-Out War (starting with #127, or Volume 22, or the second half of Volume 11 of the hardcovers) change quite a lot, for reasons that I may have spoiled a bit alread, and that we have still to fully learn about.

  • Well, I'm almost convinced to try out some of the War (which I won't even consider unless I can get it from the library). It does sound like vol. 22 signals such a significant change that I could just dive into it. Nice to hear that there is that kind of change, because Negan strikes me as the Governor 2.0. Same character, just more powerful and possibly crazier.

  • Vol. 22 / #127 / Hardcover Volume 11's second half is very much a jumping on point.  Even for those who began with #1.

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