I’m thinking that there are two things going on in The Walking Dead as an overall series. One of these is the occasional moment of plot shock. You may remember opening a certain door in the prison and learning exactly why a certain prisoner had been imprisoned, for instance, or more recently the outcome of a certain gunshot. Clearly these moments, while meaningful to the characters and their lives, are the simplest parts of the story creatively. So I’ve been trying to figure out what else is going on, especially after the mislead regarding a cure that kind of caught me off-guard and left me wondering if the series is even still worth reading. I do like the shocks and to see what happens next, don’t get me wrong, I just need to know that there’s some kind of plan to what happens next, and I’ve had my moments of doubt on that point.

As of A Larger World, I think I finally know what’s going on. This is… something I already said in the last review. And now I’m already halfway in with nothing more to say. Unexpected! See, my point had been that the series is basically Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of human needs, with zombies. Our heroes started out just trying to not die, and then to find shelter and food and love, and now they are nearly at the end of the journey. There is safety, some amount of acceptance, and the promise of other survivors out there in the, er, larger world. Does this mean that communities can be built and the world return to normal? Yeah, I dunno, but I do know that you can’t carry the story farther than the outcome of that question. There might be one more book to the series, or there might be two, but I cannot believe there can be much quality literature beyond that point.

(I’ll still read it, because there will still be characters I care about struggling against zombies. But the story, such as it is, will be over.)

When I saw the cover to the most recent Walking Dead collection, I came to what is perhaps an ironic realization.[1] I think that maybe the title of the series does not actually refer to zombies! (Not that there was any particular thing on the cover, especially a particular thing about the story in question; it just happened.) I really have nowhere else to go with this point, it just struck me and seemed relevant to share.

As for the irony, though: this is the book in which real steps are taken toward moving from survival toward a higher step on Maslow’s ladder[2]. On the one hand, I am excited to see the few surviving characters I still care about finally seeming on the verge of a happy ending. But on the other hand, it really does feel like things are edging toward an ending, and speaking of ironies, now that it’s upon me, I’m not so sure I wanted it after all.

That said, I’m objectively wrong, and all stories should end while they’re still at least somewhat good. That said, this is obviously not the last volume and there are still stories left to resolve. But it really does feel like the home stretch, and as much as I don’t want to give my characters up, I also don’t really want to see them forced into an implausible new flight from an implausible new disaster. I’m pretty sure I want that one more, and I know for a fact that I should.

[1] Also, as with all literary analysis, I may be full of crap.
[2] Yes. I know. Shush.

So you want to read a bad graphic novel? Allow to recommend Fire and Ice, a book that makes me look longingly back on the manga-style of the last few Resident Evil comics I’ve read. (Which, to be fair, is more a comment on my dislike of manga than on the quality of this book’s art. The troubles, as you will see, lie elsewhere.) So, it starts with some random characters that the authors seem confident I should be attached to despite them being uninteresting, overly soap-operaish in their equally uninteresting interrelationships, and never having been introduced before. The never-mentioned Charlie Team of S.T.A.R.S.[1] is off on missions to Mexico and Alaska to stop Umbrella from blah blah blah zombie-cakes. And yes, that’s the entire source of the title, is that some people went somewhere hot and set a fire while some other people went somewhere cold and I guess there was an avalanche maybe? Also a giant flying zombie penguin, because they live in the Arctic Circle now, apparently. Probably for the candy.[2] And then, after that series was over, I still had half the book left, in which possibly the characters could be developed a bit more and I could decide that, okay, there was a point after all.

Yeah, no. Instead, there were a lot of very short (short enough that if they were sold as individual comics at today’s prices, I predict that a lot of punching occurred later) stories set between and before Resident Evil 1 and 2, mostly traveling backward through time, but not because of a cool literary trick that reveals more detail with each step backward, no, they’re just arranged oddly for no good reason. Some of them were slightly amusing, some of them were shitty retreads of stories told better by the actual game, item-collecting and steps-retracing[3] and all. Some of them were just not any good at all. In the only original story to which I attached any interest, the characters were anonymously killed at the end in a wry twist reveal that this particular outbreak predated all the games, which is why nobody ever heard about it. To be fair, I think that last one would have bothered me less if I had not been looking for a character to care about for the entire damn book.

I mean, aside from the flying zombie penguin.

[1] They were the folks who exposed the Umbrella conspiracy in the first game, and were basically all dead by the end, the few individual survivors working together under their own recognizance with no leadership structure anymore, so on top of the rest, there’s a pretty massive canon violation.
[2] I’ll take really, really obscure internet jokes for $600, Alex.
[3] “Hey, look, I should grab another part of this bomb that I haven’t mentioned needing to find, in case I want to set off a bomb later!” “Ooooo, I should take this key and go back to that locked door on the other side of the mansion from  before!”