The Sprout

Graphic Viewing

Posted by archifCLICarchive from National - Published on 17/04/2011 at 20:00
3 comments » - Tagged as Culture, Topical

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Last Sunday saw the premiere of The Walking Dead, after Channel 5 splashed their cash to buy the rights for terrestrial television. The new zombie horror is an adaptation of the amazing graphic novels of the same name by Robert Kirkman, and for me shows just how a graphic novel should be adapted.

The Walking Dead is a character-driven zombie apocalyse story, the books of which Kirkman is still writing. As he states in the introduction to his books, he intends to have the story continue for as long as possible - to look not just at that period normally covered in a zombie movie (the outbreak of some kind of infection and how people survive it), but to see how people cope years down the line.

Both the books and the series are brutal, disturbing and uncompromising. Make no mistake, this TV series is a full-strength zombie horror that will not disappoint fans of such movies - the makers have acknowledged that they have been allowed to push the boundary in terms of gore on television.

It's exciting to see a graphic novel make such a popular move into television - it has a big budget, some famous names (Andrew Lincoln of Teachers stars, and Frank Darabont of The Green Mile directs) and an increasingly large number of viewers. I really hope that it lasts as long as the books do, as the storylines are consistantly brilliant and surprising. Plus, the greater its success, the more chance of adapting other comic books into ambitious TV shows. Titles such as Y: The Last Man by Brian Vaughn and DMZ by Brian Wood especially would benefit from television rather than film adaptations; they are, after all, written as a series, and would provide more original and compelling shows than such offerings as The Event or Flashforward.

So this is my call for you to start watching The Walking Dead (it is probably an 18 though!) You will not regret it if you enjoy a zombie movie, or just excellent drama, and the more fans it can get behind it, the better chance it has in these cut-throat days of television ratings and cancellations. Catch up on the show here and you can read any of the graphic novels I mention in Cardiff libraries - they're three of my all-time favourites.

IMAGE: Mehdi Drouillion