The Walking Dead 87: Review and Spoilers

Another Wednesday brought me to the comic book shop in search of treasure- or at least something worth reading. My pick for this week is again The Walking Dead. Issue 87 has kept up the trend of offering up a lot of good reading for the money, this issue's extra being a preview of The Rise of the Governor, coming out this fall. I found the characters engaging and relatable. I really want to know what happened at Wiltshire Estates. The intent of including this was to make me want to buy the book. Mission accomplished. My only quibble is with "her ashen face is almost angelic," being said about a young lady who is neither dead nor, to the best of this reader's knowledge, dying. Healthy kids don't have ashen faces, so is there something going on medically, or was it just a severe case of one word not chosen well? And will I let this dig into my brain?

Naw. There's the main part of the comic book yet to review.

And here unfortunately was one misstep I hoped Kirkman and company would avoid. Carl "woke up" too soon and with apparently nothing more than an eye put out and some soap-opera style amnesia. Granted, readers may be bored by stuff that seems overly medical, but some real life details of severe head trauma and recovering from it might have served well- like the way people look when their eyes are open and they may begin responding, but they're still not back up to a fifteen on the Glasgow coma scale. That hard stare that may be unfocused or too focused, that can express very strongly any emotion or nothing at all but can't actually tell you anything, from someone you're not sure is even aware of you- that to me is creepier and might have had the potential to drive Rick even further up the wall with his regrets.

That Rick has to deal with his regrets and that he's not having an easy time with it, that neither Holly nor Rosita are letting Abraham get away with his bad romantic choices, and that the community's dealing with a looming food shortage, impending winter, and what could (and should be) a pretty long, tough rehabilitation period for a good but critically injured character makes me wonder how they'll cope, and it makes me want to stick around to find out how well they'll manage. If they manage...