Last year, I wrote:
I’d like to see what a surviving-a-day-at-a-time hero looks like. Whatever collection of writers can come up with that story and characterization will make a lot of money breaking with the current anti-hero conventions. More to the point, it might be good for us. Though we may [not] have had too many actual-or-metaphorical vampires of late, perhaps we do still need to see complicated characters dealing with the morally ambiguous world, and for that I think there’s nothing better than a survivor’s tale, where ordinary folks face the ravages of an apocalypse without losing their humanity. Post-apocalyptic stories capture the sense of morally ambiguous survival without pretense of authenticity or excellence.
Well, it’s finally happened. AMC has begun production of Robert Kirkman’s The Walking Dead. Kirkman’s zombie story is exactly what I was thinking of as I wrote those words: no climax, just life subsisting after the apocalypse, “it’s like a zombie movie that never ends.”
I think this is just what we need… unless it turns out to be true that zombies are popular when Republicans win elections.
Second Opinions