The Walking Dead ***With Comic Spoilers***

[Buck]

Sunday Nights at 9pm/8pm (Central) on AMC.

Note from Gonzo:

Spoiler Tag all comic book references please. Anything from episodes that have already aired is fine.

[cabletech94]

Originally Posted by Fire Me Boy!

AMC isn't "network TV". It's cable, and the FCC doesn't have any control.

I knew somebody was gonna slam my nuts in the door when I typed that. I'm typing on wifes iPad, and I hate editing with this thing.
Why don't I use this opportunity yo ask where I could buy a good cast iron cooking pan. Primarily for grilling burgers/etc.

[cabletech94]

Originally Posted by blaise

No, but they may have to make different decisions than say, HBO would, because of advertiser concerns.

Boom goes the dynamite!

[Huffmeister]

Originally Posted by notorious

I just finished reading "The Zombie Survival Guide".


I give it a B.

I know it's been brought multiple times, but have you read World War Z (also by Brooks)? If not, do yourself a favor and pick it up today.

[Fire Me Boy!]

Originally Posted by cabletech94

I knew somebody was gonna slam my nuts in the door when I typed that. I'm typing on wifes iPad, and I hate editing with this thing.
Why don't I use this opportunity yo ask where I could buy a good cast iron cooking pan. Primarily for grilling burgers/etc.

Walmart/Target/Amazon.

Just go with Lodge.

[NewChief]

Originally Posted by Huffmeister

I know it's been brought multiple times, but have you read World War Z (also by Brooks)? If not, do yourself a favor and pick it up today.

Seconded. Also, Colson Whitehead is supposed to have a "fresh" look at zombie fiction. He's a "literary" writer, so I'm curious whether anyone has read it or not. I'll probably pick it up.

http://articles.latimes.com/2011/oct...ehead-20111030

Colson Whitehead really couldn't have picked a better time to write a zombie novel. Even looking past its Halloween-adjacent release date, "Zone One" comes at a time when such horrors are enjoying a pop culture renaissance that arguably began with Danny Boyle's "28 Days Later" in 2002. In recent years the fascination has grown to include fan conventions, groaningly slouched "zombie walks" through city streets and the splatter-core success of AMC's adaptation of the graphic novel series, "The Walking Dead," which drew record ratings in its season premiere.

Whitehead has explained in interviews that his interest stems from an urge to revisit the horror stories that framed his childhood rather than any sort of trend-hopping, and the proof is in the book's uniquely affecting results. Though certainly as grisly as any of the genre's other memorable excursions that explored such visceral pleasures as those that come from briskly thwacking the undead with a cricket bat (see 2004's "Shaun of the Dead"), Whitehead's zombie universe is a much more tragic and undeniably more human place.

Opening with a romantic remembrance of a still "normal" New York from a young survivor-turned-soldier ironically nicknamed Mark Spitz (a harrowing incident involving a refusal to swim to safety is explained later), "Zone One" spares the form's conventional reliance on summer-movie scares and chase scenes — though there's plenty of those too — and instead turns an unsparing focus on the dark reality such a world-crumbling plague unleashes.

Now part of a militia governed by what's left of a hobbled, corporate-sponsored "American Phoenix" government in Buffalo, Mark Spitz is part of an ambitious effort to reclaim a country for the living that starts with a block-by-block sweep through a walled-off section of Lower Manhattan that gives the book its name. Describing the task in eliminating remaining zombies both volatile ("skels") and those infected but frozen in a sad, catatonic loop of their usual lives in the city's broken-down buildings ("stragglers"), Whitehead casts this three-day spine of the novel with a rich mix of wartime satire and darkly funny social commentary. Loaded with vivid details about a fallen city's lost leftovers, the novel at various points touches on images from our current recession, the aftermath of Sept. 11 and a futile search for sanity among soldiers that recalls a sort of zombie-centric update of "Dispatches," Michael Herr's hauntingly intimate collection of Vietnam war reporting from 1977.

Because as much as Whitehead was inspired by and occasionally references the '70s disaster movies that share DNA with "Zone One," it's his remarkable turns of phrase that lift the story above the gory rubble of a midday matinee. Whether charged with bleak sadness or bone-dry humor, sentences worth savoring pile up faster than the body count, such as cynically acute details like three young triplets who become a reality show-like cause for the soldiers, and a new national anthem, "Stop! Can You Hear the Eagle Roar? (Theme From Reconstruction)." At one point, Whitehead compares humanity's shift to the ravenous undead as self-actualization for the secretly immoral or those too timid to chase their dreams. "I have always been like this," Whitehead coldly observes in a mob of townspeople-turned-monsters. "Now I'm more me."

[Huffmeister]

Originally Posted by NewChief

Seconded. Also, Colson Whitehead is supposed to have a "fresh" look at zombie fiction. He's a "literary" writer, so I'm curious whether anyone has read it or not. I'll probably pick it up.

http://articles.latimes.com/2011/oct...ehead-20111030

Sounds interesting. I love zombies, but the over-hype of everything zombie these days is just annoying. Zombie walks, zombie podcasts, zombie cake pictures on Reddit, zombie computer/console games. Actually having a "fresh" take on zombies is a difficult task. Which is why I think I enjoy zombies as more of a backdrop to tell another type of story than just gory horror.

WWZ has a great view into how different people and different cultures could potentially react to a global epidemic. It also had great characters and some really cool "what if" scenarios.

The Walking Dead has good characters (although they drive me crazy sometimes), but it's mainly a survival story that looks into how you would react and behave if most of modern civilization had gone out the window.

And the gore can be fun, too. But it's definitely not why I watch/read zombie stories.

[notorious]

Originally Posted by Huffmeister

I know it's been brought multiple times, but have you read World War Z (also by Brooks)? If not, do yourself a favor and pick it up today.

Already ordered. Thanks!

[NewChief]

Originally Posted by notorious

Already ordered. Thanks!

It's about 10 times the book that the Zombie Survival Guide is. Seriously. It's awesome.

[notorious]

I am a pretty tough critic when it comes to books BTW. The only book that gets an "A" that I have ever read is newest full version of "The Stand".

[NewChief]

Originally Posted by notorious

I am a pretty tough critic when it comes to books BTW. The only book that gets an "A" that I have ever read is newest full version of "The Stand".

My problem with Zombie Survival Guide is that it's a gimmick book, to me. It's the book I point my struggling reader students to, because it's broken into small sections, has illustrations, and allows them to browse read instead of following a narrative. WWZ is an actual novel, and a badass one at that.

[notorious]

Originally Posted by NewChief

My problem with Zombie Survival Guide is that it's a gimmick book, to me. It's the book I point my struggling reader students to, because it's broken into small sections, has illustrations, and allows them to browse read instead of following a narrative. WWZ is an actual novel, and a badass one at that.

You summed it up to a "T".

[Huffmeister]

Originally Posted by NewChief

My problem with Zombie Survival Guide is that it's a gimmick book, to me. It's the book I point my struggling reader students to, because it's broken into small sections, has illustrations, and allows them to browse read instead of following a narrative. WWZ is an actual novel, and a badass one at that.

Yeah, WWZ is like an extrapolation of the "Recorded Attacks" section of the Zombie Survival Guide. Which, by the way has one of the creepiest zombie scenarios ever...

Spoiler!

... the slave ship. The thought of being a slave is bad enough, but to be chained laying down in a line, with a zombie on one end, and waiting through the cycle of get bitten, die, re-animate, bite the next person, etc, listening to it come down the line, getting closer and closer, knowing your inevitable fate and not being able to do anything about it. That is just creepy as hell.

[frankotank]

SURELY WWZ isn't on par with The Stand?
I haven't read a good book in a while (SK's last book The Dome was ass). Guess I'll have to check it out.

[blaise]

The Stand was good until the last 100 pages or so, I thought. I hated the end, just like most of his books.

[Baby Lee]

Originally Posted by blaise

The Stand was good until the last 100 pages or so, I thought. I hated the end, just like most of his books.

It seems, and this isn't limited to King, the longer the book, the more disappointing the ending.