The Walking Dead, Vol. 15: We Find Ourselves

The Walking Dead, Vol. 15: We Find Ourselves by Robert Kirkman
Illustrator: Charlie Adlard
Format: Trade Paperback Comic
Published: 2012
Publisher: Image Comics
Collects: #85-90

The 16th volume of this came out last week, which reminded me that I had this one sitting unread on my shelf. I haven’t been reading many comics lately, and they’re starting to pile up. I’ll have to start slotting some in between novels.

The Walking Dead had been feeling quite stale for me, but the last volume was a great one. It had some horrific moments, and the end hinted at some exciting character development to come. In this volume, we see that start to take shape. The whole series has been a fairly predictable cycle of ‘make camp’, ‘something goes wrong’, ‘find new camp’, and it was getting a bit old. You knew it was going to happen, it was just a matter of finding out how it would happen.

The gang is now in a good spot. The community is fairly safe and starting to build towards the future. They’re running out of food slowly, and there is some internal conflict, but Rick seems to have new priorities after recent events. My hope is that the series takes this shift and goes with it. I’d like to see how the community progresses and how they go about rebuilding society. That’s a stage in the zombie genre that’s rarely touched upon, but there may be a reason for that. How do you keep that exciting without going for contrived twists?

It’ll be interesting to see if the next volume takes the normal route and falls into mayhem, or if he’ll start mixing it up a bit.