Review: AMC’s The Walking Dead
There’s a term for the pacing of modern comic books: decompression. If you read a comic book any time before the mid-90s, you’ll find it’s paced at breakneck speed with page after page of small frames full of text and dialogue. Since the mid-90s, the trend has been toward slower pacing, less text, and more full page images.
All of this allows the writer/artist to develop mood and character in a more cinematic way. It also makes the story move glacially. A plot which might have taken a single issue in 1975 now stretches out for twelve. Sometimes this is good, other times it isn’t. In the best examples, it allows for a deeper, more realistic story.
The Walking Dead, adapted from a comic book series, is zombie film decompressed. The first episode covers ground familiar to any zombie fan: our hero slowly discovers the horror of his newly zombie infested world, but where most films take ten minutes or so to cover this ground (or skip it entierely), The Walking Dead gives it a full hour.
Stretching ten minutes of story over an hour could be excruciating, but series creator Frank Darabont (writer/director of The Shawshank Redemption) fills the empty space with interesting details and some really nice, really human drama.
And while The Walking Dead doesn’t hold back on the gruesome images that are required in a good zombie story, the first episode is relatively light on scares. It’s more about the hero coming to terms with the new world he’s in, and then making the decision to carry on in the role he’s always held: a sheriff’s deputy.
That said, when the scares came, they were good. If you’re on the fence about watching yet another zombie story (and there are too many), give The Walking Dead a try.
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