It's been a long time since I’ve cared about The Walking Dead. During my last year of high school, I got really into the AMC series, marathoning the second season at a friend's house. Daryl looking extremely cool with a crossbow may or may not have played a role in me and my dad deciding to buy a compound bow so we could shoot stuff in our yard while also looking cool.
This was before me or my friends had Netflix, and before the show was available there anyway, so we watched the episodes on my friends’ parents' DVR. I even came back home from college in the fall to watch the season three premiere, but that season was where the show lost me once and for all.
Like Game of Thrones, The Walking Dead frequently killed off important characters. Unlike Game of Thrones, its focus on one group of people instead of a gigantic cast that sprawled across two continents meant that those deaths took a greater toll on its audience. Once Shane and Laurie were dead, I just couldn't bring myself to care anymore.
As a result, I haven't paid attention to anything TWD related in about a decade, and that disinterest extended to Telltale's The Walking Dead, despite the series (especially its first season) receiving a ton of praise and awards. I started it on a couple occasions, but just couldn't bring myself to get invested in this world again.
But I love Tillie Walden’s work. The Eisner-winning cartoonist is one of my favorite artists working in comics and her webcomic On a Sunbeam, which I got into once it was published as a hardcover graphic novel, is one of my favorite things to ever be published in the medium. So, seeing that she was the writer and artist behind The Walking Dead’s Clementine spin-off comic, the first volume of which was published last year, was all I needed to get back into the series.
And it’s pretty great! Set after the events of Telltale’s games, it follows Clementine as she joins up with a young Amish man named Amos who is leaving his village for the first Rumspringa since the outbreak. The two travel together to a mountain where they end up living with a trio of young women who are attempting to survive at the snow-covered peak, far from walkers but near to the kinds of danger that cold, avalanches, and isolation introduce. As in her other comics, Walden is brilliant at capturing the small moments that change the course of a relationship between two characters. It reminds me more of The Last of Us than The Walking Dead, and as a massive TLOU fan that's a very good thing.
Now I'm itching to play the other critically acclaimed narrative-driven zombie game about the relationship between a man with a tragic past and an innocent young girl who becomes hardened by the world around her and eventually survives being bitten by a zombie. The thing is, I'm staring down the barrel of Baldur's Gate 3, a game that I am fully anticipating will consume my August and September at the very least. If I play my cards right, I may be able to slot a full The Walking Dead series playthrough into the small window of time after I finish Baldur's Gate and before Clementine Book Two comes out on October 3. The fact that I’m even thinking about throwing a wrench in my schedule for a Walking Dead game is a testament to the power of Tillie Walden’s work. Book Two can’t come soon enough.