shittywebcomics:

So the other day i had an argument with my buddy about the walking dead tv series, which i want to see. He told me not to bother as it’s garbage and that the comic (which i’ve never read) is better. Watcha say, Papa SWC?

I have 2 big problems with The Walking Dead.

First is that slow zombies are boring and obsolete. For those too young to remember, prior to 2000, nobody cared about zombies outside of some movie geeks. There were maybe 4 well known zombie movies over 40 years. Then 28 Days Later and Dawn of the Dead (2004)  changed everything. Fast zombies and instant infection made zombies dangerous and exciting again. With slow zombies, you have to majorly dumb down the characters to be clumsy idiots in order for there to be a threat. You almost never have a slow zombie kill that doesn’t involve a character tripping over furniture (in fact, the awful Land of the Dead movie didn’t have a single zombie kill that wasn’t furniture tripping related). I think something like 90% of the kills in The Walking Dead comic were characters turning their back to a dark doorway to shout “It’s all clear!” before a zombie popped out and bit them.

Second and most important, the show and comic are a soap opera written by nerds with poor grasps of social interaction. A drama centered around social dynamics written by the people with the worst understanding of people. There’s the old saying “write what you know”, and it’s painful trying to read comic book nerds try to tell me how social norms break down during the apocalypse. Writers trying to do anything remotely heavily usually fail badly unless they’ve either lived the subject or researched the everloving shit out of it. Mark Twain grew up in the south during slavery. George Orwell was an active cog in Britain’s colonial imperialism. William Golding witnessed the carnage at D-Day and Walcheran. Kurt Vonnegut did clean up duty in the cinders of Dresden. Thomas Harris spent 10 years as a reporter covering crimes.

Those people get to lecture me on the human condition and psyche. Robert Kirkman consumed comic books his whole life (even Alan Moore lived a more interesting life than that). Kirkman doesn’t get to tell me shit. His understanding of people is based off secondhand cliches that are at least four steps from any meaningful life experiences.

I’m not saying you have to live through horrible wars to be a decent writer, but you’re not going to produce anything heady of quality just because you want to. It has to be part of your life or at the very least the result of tons and tons of research. I doubt Kirkman even so much as cracked open the notes of something like the Standford prison experiment. More likely he just copied all the type-A asshole arguing scenes from horror movies. You can get away with that if you’re just doing some fluff movie, but a 10 year long soap opera on human relationships?

If you want to write something heavy of quality, you can’t base it entirely on other works of fiction that dealt with heavy subjects (or in Kirman’s case, works of fiction based on works of fiction based on works of fiction of heavy subjects). Bare minimum you have to go to the real life source and study it first, and that’s the problem with a lot modern fiction: too many second and third hand writers, basing everything on recycled cliche to the point where they forgot what real world factors the cliches were even based on in the first place (this is how 99% of anime stories happen).

Will you enjoy watching The Walking Dead? I’d say only if you were one of the people who enjoyed watching all the soap opera and flashbacks of Lost, or could at least tolerate them to get to the mystery parts.

The comic is total dogshit though.

P.S. Anyone saying “zombie movies aren’t about the zombies, they’re about the characters, maaaayn” is full of shit trying to convince you how introspective they are. The Dawn of the Dead remake was the best zombie movie ever made precisely because it didn’t try to preach, as opposed to dogshit like 28 Weeks Later trying to be a message movie.

I blame Romero for buying into his own hype that Night of the Living Dead had a race message (it didn’t).

Hey all you wannabe writers guess what your work is never done.