Recently, at the behest of several friends of mine I started reading yet another series of graphic novels. This one is about zombies. I used to snobbishly avoid graphic novels, deeming them inferior to "real" books. I liked to say that graphic novels were for those who had never grown out of picture books. Now I cannot get enough of them and laud their ability to tell stories in a way that no other medium can quite replicate. The series I just started, "The Walking Dead", chronicles a man trying to keep his family together as zombies overrun the world. I cannot say the book has made a difference in my life (although I have had a few messed up dreams recently), but the series manages to ask pertinent, powerful questions amidst the blood and gore without coming off as pretentious...only curious.
What happens if the world crumbles and cannot be fixed? How do people live when those they love most are constantly in harm's way? To whom can we turn when our leaders, police forces and armies fall? What must we become when the only rulebook to a hell on earth is the one we write and rewrite as life continues to surprise and shock us as we tramp through the darkness, trying not to succumb to it?
"The Walking Dead" does not provide definitive answers to any of these questions. What I especially enjoy about this series is that it acknowledges the diversity amongst personalities. A preacher locks his congregation out of his church, denying them a safe-haven, so he can survive. A small band of young adults turn into cannibals out of "necessity" and explain their motives to their victims, almost looking fot understanding if not forgiveness. Murderers, rapists, and thieves: criminals of all kinds appear when the law disappears.
Then there are those few that give us hope. Our survivors might be ruthless at times, but they love and protect each other as best they can. They always try to do what is right, whatever right may be in their newly diseased world. Each individual is broken in his or her own way, but their fluid community offers a necessary sense of security and family they cannot find anywhere else.
The first two or three books of the series spend most of their time exploring how different personalities take shape when exposed to severe and extended trauma (in this case a zombie epidemic). There are those who become leaders out of necessity, those who lie to get what they need, those who sell themselves or their skills for protection, those who go a little crazy or break completely, and those who are so set in believing in a greater force, be it God or the government, that is going to save them that they become a hindrance to themselves and their friends.
The later books in the series focus are more situational in nature, Members of our group are constantly dying, but there is also new life, and new recruits, an underlying desire in everyone to pursue as conventional of a life as is possible, and a wariness (sometimes warranted and sometimes not) whenever meeting new people.
These books offer a glimpse at humanity purified by fire. In book twelve, a young boy leaves his dying father's side for a moment to lure away the zombies outside their door. Three zombies attack him and somehow he manages to kill them singlehandedly. He returns to his comatose father and tells him he has outgrown his Daddy and can take care of himself. Not five pages later, he is a child again and he begs his father to wake up because he cannot face the world alone.
It is these moments that make these books so powerful. I am not fond of gore, but I can look past it for watching the process of growing up expedited by circumstance, seeing how love and greed are equally powerful motivators for all kinds of people and learning, along with those in the book, that evil can be performed and experienced for both right and for wrong. The only thing that we can hope is to always be able to distinguish between the two.
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