crowning moment of awesome: the walking dead
“I ain’t gonna bury you again, you son of a bitch”
Came a bit late to this series, but I just tanned an Amazon voucher getting the first six trades. The series, written by Robert Kirkman and drawn mostly by Blighty’s own Charlie Adlard, follows the travails of a group of survivors in the wake of a zombie apocalypse. What I love about The Walking Dead is the juxtaposition of logistical trivia — how they get by on an everyday level — with extreme violence — headlopping the undead — and frequent crowning moments of awesome. Our nominal hero, down-to-earth small-town cop Rick, gets most of them: upon learning that his former partner, who had an affair with his wife and then tried to kill him, may have turned into a zombie and is probably buried (kind of) alive, Rick digs him up just so he can kill him again. Later, beating a child-murderer so hard he breaks all his own fingers is pretty grim, but still pretty bad-ass.
As much as I like Rick, it has to be said that the baddest crowning moment of badassery belongs to hammer-wielding Tyrese. After his daughter is killed in a botched suicide pact, the inexplicably calm ex-pro footballer decides to clear out a gymnasium full of zombies as a sort of catharsis. His friends carefully and methodically shoot each zombie — crucially remembering to stay near the door — but Tyrese gets hammer-happy and wades into the ghouls. He’s soon overwhelmed, and his horrified friends are forced to leg it. When this is related to Rick he demands to know if anyone actually saw Tyrese’s body, and busts into the gym. Where Tyrese sits, surrounded by a gym full of definitely-not-coming-back zombies: “What kept you?” Nails hard.