The Walking Dead has become a cultural phenomenon, and all of that started with the comics. The book, by Robert Kirkman and artists Tony Moore and Charlie Adlard, was the definition of must-read from the beginning, way back in 2003. The first issue was underprinted, and The Walking Dead became one of the hottest books in the comic industry for years. It brought attention to Image Comics again, and an argument can be made that the success of The Walking Dead led to Image Comics becoming a big deal again. The Walking Dead would make it way to TV and became what is arguably the most popular comic adaptation ever (yes, even more popular than the MCU).
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The Walking Dead is one of the greatest Image comics series ever, with fans loving the book still to this day. It’s so popular that it’s being completely reprinted in color, with fans still buying the book. The adventures of Rick Grimes made zombie stories great again, but it can also be blamed for the fall of zombie stories as well. In fact, I would say that the comic sounded the death knell for zombie stories much earlier than most people realize, and it happened in the Woodbury arc of the book.
Woodbury Made the Zombies Less Important in The Walking Dead
The survivors found Woodbury in The Walking Dead #27. At this point in the story, Rick had found his family, the drama with Shane was over, and the group had found a prison to live in. Throughout the prior 26 issues, the zombies felt like a massive threat. The group had lost many people, the majority of them to the zombies, and there was a visceral fear among readers that the zombies were this unstoppable force, a tide that would come in and sweep away fan-favorite characters. The zombies were the main villain of the book at this point.
Now, sure, there were problems among the group and with other survivors, but the zombies were the threat that everyone had to learn to deal with. Woodbury changed all of that. This was a group of survivors who survived because they were ruthless. The Governor was a monster, but a human one, and suddenly, it was the human monsters that became the focus. The prison arc leading up to Woodbury started in this direction (I still remember the page turn with the beheaded twins being the first thing you saw at the top of the page), but the zombies were still the main threat.
The Walking Dead shifted course at this point, and it stopped being a zombie horror book. Most fans of those early issues will remember Rick’s speech that ended with him screaming, “We are the walking dead!” The moments leading up to that, as well as Woodbury, made the comic into a dystopian apocalypse horror story. The zombies were a problem, but they were one that was getting easier to deal with. The Walking Dead became a book with human villains, and the horror was more about what people did to each other to survive than what it took to survive a zombie apocalypse.
The Walking Dead settled into a rut after this point, one that would also extend to the TV show. It worked like this — Rick and his group would find a new safe place to live, an evil group of humans would either control it or be near it, there would be a war of some kind, and then they’d move on to another place. Zombies were just set dressing. Some people would argue that this made the book better, but it made it something that we’d experienced before, and it created a cycle that would go unbroken until its end.
The Walking Dead‘s Formula Post-Woodbury Destroyed the Zombie Genre
Before Woodbury, zombies showing up was a big deal. Readers got scared because the zombies were the threat. After Woodbury, zombies were a nuisance that could shock readers, but the real villains were men like the Governor and Negan. The Walking Dead became a different kind of horror book; it was still good (to those who liked it; I personally got tired of the new formula almost immediately), but it wasn’t a zombie book anymore.
The Walking Dead was always more of a rich character piece than anything else, and that stayed the same throughout the book’s history. However, the way the zombies stopped being the main threat made this into a story that we had seen before. The Walking Dead was just post-apocalyptic fiction, and suddenly every zombie story tried to be it. Even the ones that weren’t originally like The Walking Dead, like the excellent novel World War Z, eventually became like it, like the mediocre World War Z movie. The Walking Dead brought zombies back, and then it killed them.
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