Now that The Walking Dead TV series is a huge success for AMC and has been renewed for a second season, Robert Kirkman fans should take a moment to recognize that the second episode of the series was extraordinarily troubling. Not troubling like a city full of zombies banging on the door to the department store building you're hiding in, but troubling in the sense that the storytelling gestures were heavy-handed (no, we don't actually need to see Lori dramatically remove her wedding ring before having sex with Shane) overly earnest (Andrea's sister loves mermaids, how sweet), and in the case of Merle Dixon, simply cheap. Yes, having a character drop a few n-bombs immediately after being introduced is a quick way of showing they're an unsympathetic racist, but it immediately cuts the audience off from the character. What's more realistic, that an ideologically committed racist would sublimate his views in the name of survival, or risk alienating himself from his best chance of avoiding being zombie dinner? Merle Dixon is a fucking idealist.
What was great about Kirkman's comic is its relative lack of sentiment, its willingness to allow even its most compelling characters to meet gruesome ends while crushing the survivors under the weight of incomprehensible suffering in the face of a bleak, hopeless future. You turn the page because you can't believe the people who are still alive are actually making it, and because you can't wait to see the people they must become in order to do so. The Walking Dead is fundamentally a tragedy about how people become inhuman in order to survive, and for that to work, you need some characters who actually resemble human beings.
