Season 2 of The Walking Dead flew by and has created a void for me to fill until the season 3 premiere later this year. I deemed it necessary to fill the empties by finding out just what happened to everyone after they were rooted from Hershel’s farm, which was over run with walkers. I decided to go back a ways, when Shane Walsh and Lori Grimes “hooked up” while Rick was in a coma in the comic series.

The Walking Dead comic book series has been in publication since the fall 2003 and has since succeeded in capitalizing on the whole “zombie” craze. What is unique about Kirkman’s comic book series is that it is now accessible via the Amazon’s Kindle Fire.   Since I am only recapping parts of season 1 and 2, I will try and compare a few of the differences in the televised  series and the comic book where needed. Note: there are *Spoilers Below*

“Days Gone Bye” begins just before the ‘zombie outbreak,’ where Shane and Rick are in a shoot-out with an escaped prisoner. Rick was shot during the confrontation, which is also depicted in the premiere episode in season 1 of The Walking Dead. Rick is hospitalized in Harrison Memorial Hospital, last visited by Shane, in a coma on the show. In the comic, Rick wakes up and falls out of bed. After his cries for help go unanswered, Rick dresses himself and searches the hospital to find it abandoned.

He then happens upon the barred door of the hospital cafeteria and a horde of zombie begin to pour from the room. Rick is attacked by one of the zombies and they both plummet down the stairs–which decapitated the head of the walker and Rick struggles free. He escapes and manages to find a way home. On his path, he is disgusted by the rotting, still moving corpses and is visibly upset and sick at the horrors he witnessed along the way. He makes it to his derelict neighborhood and enters his abandoned home. Soon, he finds himself knocked out, and in the home of Morgan Jones. Morgan’s son, Duane, knocked Rick out with a shovel. His father knows he’s alive and brings him into the temporary safety of his home.

The show also proceeded in a similar manner, but in the comic, the trio went to the police station to get guns and ammo, and Morgan updated Rick about what happened and how survivors were told to head to the cities for safety. He also briefed Rick about how to kill the walking un-dead. What isn’t in the comic, but is on the show was the ordeal with Morgan and his ‘walking dead’ wife. The episode ended as Morgan struggled emotionally whether or not he should shoot his wife. Meanwhile, Rick is on his way to Atlanta to find his family.

In the succeeding issues is where the series gains momentum. Rick makes it to Atlanta to find the city over run. Here is where Rick is introduced to the rest of the comic’s primary characters, and eventually, finds his wife and son. This is also when the dangerous beginnings of the defunct relationship between Rick and Shane. It is also when I began to hate Lori Grimes. While Rick is in a coma in the hospital, Shane sleeps with his wife, Lori, just as in the televised series, however, in the comic, Shane more rapidly ‘retaliates’ against Rick and ends up being shot to death by Rick’s son, Carl.

Kirkman and Moore do a fantastic job early on to encompass the importance of relationships and trust for survivor ability through out the series. They are also careful not to favor a specific pattern for the series’s progression, as evidenced by the  similarities between the comic and the television series and yet not too similar. Many of the issues and conflicts within the comic’s transcendence to the hit AMC series, and yet, are able to modify the dangerous situations, continually keeping the ‘live action’ series from becoming predictable. Kirkman capitalizes on his characters empathy, isolation, and depressive states to keep readers of the comic, and viewers of the television series “in-tune” with what it is “like” to survive a zombie apocalypse, maintaining an air of believability, without sacrificing or relying too heavily on the origin content.

The availability of the series on the Kindle allows for fans of the comic to collect each volume with ease and takes up the minimal of storage space. The pages of the comic can be read either ‘full paged,’ or if you were to double click on a specific cell, can view each element of the comic page, frame by frame, that way you can appreciate each frame in greater detail. There is an impactive dynamic to survival; personalities. Who will lead, and who will die–crucial elements that are of importance to any successful book series. Not only does The Walking Dead capture the horrors of zombie filled wastelands, it also successfully captures the foundations of humanity–how stressful situations can take its toll on good people–and those aspects of survivability which causes them to break.

Source: The Walking Dead, Days Gone Bye images (captured from) Kindle Fire