When the world of comic books mostly meant superheroes with a long history – the the X-Men and Batmen of the world – it was OK to turn their stories into feature length movies.
You could introduce the characters, tell a fairly complete story, and if all went well, return with a sequel. There would be no definitive way to handle, say, Spiderman.
But in the last few decades, comics began to change, with more and more creators introducing characters with finite stories, the type of stories that – when adapted – need to be told in a longer form.
These are comics – titles like Brian K. Vaughn’s epic, brilliant Y: The Last Man, or the Luna Brothers excellent miniseries Girls and The Sword – that make you think “This would make a great TV show.”
Which brings us to The Walking Dead. It's too early to tell whether it will make a great TV show, although Sunday night's premiere was certainly a great pilot. It was tense, moving and scary, and I'd argue that it did a much better job in fleshing out protagonist Rick Grimes than the comic had at this point. Andrew Lincoln -- a British actor effectively hiding his accent -- seems like a good choice to play Rick, a character for whom (assuming we stick to the comic) things are going to get much, much worse from here on out.
At the same time, I'm itching to get past this initial man vs. zombie stuff and move into what makes the comic so compelling: how the human characters relate to each other, and the idea that other people are a far greater threat than the undead.
Tom Coombe
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