The Walking Dead #85 – Review

By: Robert Kirkman (writer), Charlie Adlard (art), Cliff Rathburn (gray tones), Rus Wooton (letters) & Sina Grace (editor)

The Story: The humans clean up after laying a massive smack down on the zombies in last month’s issue.

[SPOILER WARNING ]

What’s Good: Comics can’t be breakneck all the time.  The Walking Dead is a marathon that alternates lots of issues of quality character-building with an issue here or there of action and terror.  In issues #83 and #84, we got a LOT of that action as the zombies came pouring into the “safe zone” outside of Alexandria and the humans (led by Rick) decided that this was the time and place to make a stand.  In those issues, you could just see that “a lot” of zombies were killed, but this issue really drives it home as we see the survivors setting about burning all the corpses.  Wow….that’s a whole lot of dead zombies!

What makes Kirkman such a good writer is how he can bounce from the action of last issue to the calm and post-traumatic stress of this issue.  After spending the last ~10 issue being certain that the survivors were going to be driven out of Alexandria by the zombies, I love that we’re getting to see them learn from the mistakes that allowed this near catastrophe to take place and make affirmative efforts to fix the situation.  Rick and his gang seem to be 100% in charge of Alexandria now.  When they first got there, they were the guests, were worried about fitting in and didn’t want to rock the boat.  Now they’re in charge and have all kinds of plans to fortify their living quarters.

Kirkman also isn’t above giving us an “Oh Shit!” moment when Rick’s girlfriend comes lurching out of the pile-o-zombies, lurching towards people with her almost severed hand from where Rick chopped her with his hatchet because she was slowing the group down and was going to get Carl killed.  As if the scene of Rick chopping her to save his and Carl’s lives a few issues ago wasn’t harsh enough, having her reanimated corpse lurching back to life just shows that Kirkman really isn’t pulling his punches.