The Walking Dead #132 - Image Comics

THE WALKING DEAD No. 132, October 2014

Initially it is easy to believe that the vast majority of this comic’s 326,334 readers entirely agreed with young Carl when Rick’s son declares, within the first dozen or so panels of “Happiness”, that “this is boring.” For not only does the cover to Issue One Hundred and Thirty Two of “The Walking Dead” consist of a rather uninspiring, lack-lustre portrait of Maggie Greene holding her child Hershel. But Robert Kirkman’s mind-numbing narrative simply spends the opening quarter of the book concentrating upon Grimes and the leader of the Hilltop Colony admiringly just “watching the sunset”…

However for those comic collectors who stuck with the Kentucky-born writer’s storyline, and incidentally helped make this edition by far the best-selling title of October 2014, the twenty-two page periodical’s script suddenly becomes a whole lot more exciting as Dante and the small search party out looking for an abandoned Ken, decide to fight their way out of a barn surrounded by shockingly judicious zombies. Such an explosive pulse-pounding change in pace, as unexpected as it is grisly, genuinely grabs the attention and those 250,000 subscribers to “the online pop culture sales club Loot Crate” who received a copy of this magazine as part of their subscription must certainly have given a sigh of relief that their monthly delivery contained at least one entertaining item...

Indeed the lengthy all-action fight sequence, as the three guards “get in formation”, “stop complaining and start hacking” at their shuffling opposition, becomes increasingly tense as the roamers’ intelligence disconcertingly increases as their numbers dwindle and the putrefying ghouls suddenly start talking to one another. This terrifyingly disturbing plot twist is then made all the more enthralling by Kirkman additionally bestowing upon the walkers the ability to attack Dante’s group with knives and hack them to death; “We can kill.”

After the disappointment of his front page illustration, and frankly an early double splash pointlessly portraying Rick and Maggie looking out across the sedentary settlement they fought to keep alive, penciller Charlie Adlard really brings his best game to the rest of this publication. In fact the British artist’s dynamically-charged drawings of Greene’s ‘right-hand man’ sword-fighting with a fully lucid and reasoning living corpse makes for incredible viewing, and really conveys the sense of adrenalin-lead fright the ‘human’ combatant must have had during his unnerving ordeal.

Writer: Robert Kirkman, Penciller: Charlie Adlard, and Inker: Stefano Gaudiano