I first began to watch the Walking Dead after playing the first two episodes of the Telltale Games Season 1 video game from 2012. I enjoyed playing that game as I was behind the controller playing as Lee Everett. I learned early on that in this series no character was spared a heinous fate, as by the end of the video game (and based on the choices that I had made) I was left with very few characters from the ones that I started the game with. This was made even more evident, as once I had made it to the end of the last episode, Lee himself would succumb to the zombie horde and thus concluding his story.
I then found the television show on Netflix, and I proceeded to watch the first two seasons and like most I was immediately hooked. I could not wait for the third season to start and see what was going to happen to the characters as they left the farm. On the show I saw a familiar face from the video game, it was Glenn; he was a favorite character of mines, along with Rick, T-dog (remember him?) and Darryl. I was blown away by the show’s first two seasons as the production was that of a blockbuster, big studio movie. I did some more research on the show and found a wiki page about it, and then I made a discovery. I found out about The Walking Dead comics which predates the show as the comics debuted in 2003.
I began to read the first few issues and I was amazed at how the show’s first season managed to capture the comics almost to the ink! Everything was there, from the bicycle girl to the horse getting devoured. I kept on reading the comics and I made it past the arc of the governor by the time that Season 3 was being aired. I began to enjoy the comics much more than I did the show, my reasons for this were two fold. For instance, in the comics, much like in the video game, characters’ deaths were more spontaneous and difficult to predict as I often found myself reading and once I turned the page the character had been killed. Furthermore, the comics had the advantage that the need not be censored by agencies like the FCC, and as such the comics is able to show blood and gore in a way that the show may never be able to. A great example of this is the arc in which Michone tortures the Governor. In the comics, machine mutilates his body, and the reader is able to see each strike, and each cut that she makes on him while in the show a lot of the scenes were out of view of the camera and some scenes flat out didn’t make it to the screen.
However, I could live with this limitation as when the show showed its gore it excelled at it and it made my intestines feel in pain whenever a walker yanked someone’s out. What I could not live with was the lack of fear that your favorite character may die at any given moment. While watching the show, I never felt like the characters could “die.” Take for example Darryl, he is a character that when/if killed, people will be outraged and the show ratings may suffer if the producers do choose to kill off his character and this removes some of the suspense that the show has.
For those of you up in arms about Glenn’s death, he has been dead since 2012, and his death could not have come at a better time than at the start of the season. No character should be “safe” in this show, as if it ever ends, it should end with the extinction of the human race.
