The Walking Dead #91 – Review

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

The Story: Life drags on inside the Arlington enclave.

Five Things: [SPOILER WARNING]

1. What a bummer resolution to the Rick-Andrea situation!  Really?  Issue #90 ends with Rick and Andrea having a passionate kiss and then we come back to the scene at an undetermined time later to see Rick pushing her away?  That sucks!  There’s no real problem with having the relationship “end” in this fashion, but why did everything have to happen off-panel?  We don’t even know if they just kissed or slept together or had an affair for a week.  This was a really unsatisfying way to handle two characters in which the readers have a lot of emotional investment.

2. Don’t like the Rick – Carl relationship either.  Man, Rick just isn’t have a very good time.  Now his son is getting all kinds of chippy with him.  Hopefully Kirkman has a plan here because it isn’t fun to see Rick getting yelled at by his son.  There were such great dramatic possibilities when Carl got shot in the face.  Imagine if Carl had forgotten everything that had happened and had to be told that his mom was dead, that he’d killed Shane and later executed another child in cold blood, etc.  THAT would have been incredible to see if Carl would reform in the same way that he had formed the first time.  But, I really don’t get the point of having him get shot if it was just to have him scream, “You don’t understand!” at his father and argue with him about the proper terminology for this hole in his head.

3. Vague new threat.  So…someone is watching the Arlington enclave.  We’ve already seen that.  In fact, one of the last crises was strangers attacking the compound.  We don’t really need to see that again.  Granted….it probably won’t be precisely that same scenario.  This stranger could be friendly.  They could be there with GOOD NEWS for a change.  But, the fact remains that the cliffhanger on the final page didn’t hit with typical TWD crispness because it came out of the blue.