The Walking Dead?

In the years since graphic novels gained recognition as a serious form of storytelling, quite a few noted series have emerged. Some of those have been postapocalyptic thrillers with a range of voices to be heard. Y: The Last Man told the tale of a society bereft of all men except one (and Ampersand, his pet monkey) and was an original take on familiar tropes. But perhaps the best known - in no small part down to the TV series based on it - is The Walking Dead.

It's got a plot familiar to any who know genre fiction. Zombies rise. World ends. Humans in danger. Stuff happens. Like most of those tales, it's gritty and 'realistic'. Or at least as realistic as it's possible for a plot to be when it relies on the dead rising in an unspecified fashion.

For the past year I've been meandering my way through the compendium editions of The Walking Dead. The first compendium begins the tale of small-town cop Rick Grimes and his family as they attempt to piece lives back together and find something new in a world at once familiar as the one they occupied for their entire lives, but also new, bereft of the familiar comforts of electricity and society itself. The subsequent compendiums, you'll be unsurprised to hear, push on through the same story, weaving a world that is at once intensely personal but also massive.

The issue with graphic novels is always with depth. The aforementioned Y: The Last Man was a good story, but at times it felt like it lacked something. Perhaps my first experiences of adult graphic novels - Watchmen, V for Vendetta - set me up for something more, but the series as a whole, whilst being immensely enjoyable, seemed to lack something. It could, of course, be the writer. I've not really got into Brian K. Vaughan's Saga either, and that's extremely highly rated elsewhere. But my experiences with other graphic novels suggests otherwise. There are plenty I've enjoyed. There are few that have left me awed in the same way as phenomenal fantasy novel or the best science fiction short stories.

Thankfully, The Walking Dead is one of the few series to have maintained that awe with its depth. It's deceptively simple at times and you could be forgiven for thinking early on that it's going to be a straightforward - if dark - tale of man versus zombie. In fact, that's perhaps as far from the truth as its possible to be. The Walking Dead is a story about humanity and how humanity faces up to disaster when society collapses. From the prison in compendium one to Alexandria and the Commonwealth in compendium four, there's a constant sense of being on the very edge of violence - not from the unknowable towards the known, but from one human to another as people are pushed right to the edge of their limits. The characters are truly what drives The Walking Dead forward. They're layered, complex. Again, a problem of graphic novels can be that characters can be left two-dimensional. Not so here. Robert Kirkman takes the time to develop them, to test them, to make them seem more real.

But does that depth come in part from the length of the series? Consider for a moment: Y: The Last Man runs to around 1,400 pages over 10 volumes. The Walking Dead runs to near enough 4,500 pages over 32 volumes collected into 4 compendiums. It could be argued - albeit not by myself - that Kirkman had the room to be patient, and to build character rather than advance the action constantly. For me, it's not an argument that holds true, but it's certainly something for a new reader to consider as they embark on the first issue.

Something that certainly isn't in doubt is the constant sense of danger that underpins the narrative. This isn't Gene Roddenberry's vision of Star Trek, that much is for sure; conflict between characters is as much the source of that violence as any. Rick is never comfortable in his position. Threat is ever-present, and not just the threat of external violence. And on the odd occasion that it lulls you into a sense of security, of cosy catastrophe a la Wyndham, there's something just around the corner to shock you back into the reality of this new world.

The Walking Dead is highly recommended. I started the series wondering whether it would be something I spent any real time with. In the end, the answer was long evenings spent in a world without TV and electricity, without structure in society, and where might was, very often, right. It's not a comfortable read, but it is one that will make you think.