Wow, There Are Zombies In This Story!: The Walking Dead #116 Review

I have not been particularly quiet about my opinion that The Walking Dead has been spinning its wheels for a while now – you get Negan making threats, Rick and company come up with some kind of plan to turn things around, Negan sees said plan coming and turns it around with effortless ease and an erudite and witty comeback such as, “In case you haven’t noticed, you’re fucking fucked, you stupid fucker,” – and yes, that was an actual quote from Negan from one of the last few issues – and you repeat and repeat and repeat until you start considering dropping the title and waiting for the trade for the first time since the seventh issue.

This seemingly endless cycle has been going on for at least 17 months, or since Negan killed Glenn… but with issue 116, we finally we have an issue of The Walking Dead where not only does something go wrong for that baseball bat-fellating son of a bitch, but where there’s an actual live zombie attack. It’s a Goddamned Christmas Miracle!

Well… Negan still says irritating cocky shit and gets a hostage out of the deal. So maybe it’s more of a Thanksgiving Miracle. You know, the kind where you still have to put up with drunken racist Uncle Pete, but you avoid jail time for choking him out because for once, you get to witness him slipping on some gravy and falls on his ass.

We pick up where we left off last issue, with Rick and company threatening to attack Negan’s camp, with Negan claiming that he has co-opted support from Jesus’s people. Negan demands that Rick’s army pack up and fuck off (almost in those exact words), but almost no one breaks ranks. Negan’s snipers start firing, and Rick’s people take cover to return fire to suppress the snipers… and to shoot out every window they can see. Negan is confused by Rick’s tactics of only noisily breaking a bunch of glass… right until the noise attracts every zombie in a five mile radius. Rick’s crew loads up and gets ready to bail out while Rick gets ready to stay behind and plow a truck through Negan’s fence to force him and his people to retreat indoors under the flood of walkers… but Holly has some other ideas.

Look, this isn’t gonna be a long review, because it doesn’t need to be. This issue is a victory because it gives us two things that, for a very long time, we could count on in a Walking Dead story that we haven’t seen: Rick being a leader with a plan that’s worth at least half a tin shit, and some fucking zombies. This was a story that could have been the climax of an earlier arc of The Walking Dead, with Rick taking action against what started as long odds and having it work out in his favor. And I have missed that kind of thing. I recognize and embrace that this is a story about people living in a world where bad things happen and, by nature, they simply cannot win – a world where dying peacefully in your sleep means that you come back as a zombie and eat your family’s respective faces is one where “triumph” takes on a much more limited meaning. But it has been so long since we have seen Rick take a win bigger than, “Hey, Negan wasn’t able to successfully kill Carl or Andrea or… well, at least Carl and Andrea are still alive!” that seeing him come out on top here was a genuine thrill.

As were the zombies. It has been a long damn time since we have seen more than the odd assorted walker that is dispatched as an afterthought or a training exercise, and instead have been focused on the gamesmanship between Rick and Negan, that it is easy to forget that they are the primary threat here. And while I have bemoaned the constant “two guys cursing at each other over a fence” plots that we have seen ad infinitum for months, it had a secondary effect of putting the zombies out of my mind. Which meant that when I turned the page from yet another firefight to artist Charlie Adlard’s double pages spread of zombies converging on hundreds of zombies converging on Negan’s compound, it was almost shocking. And it was definitely exciting.

Speaking of Adlard’s art, it goes a long way toward selling the excitement in this issue. His storytelling is clear and straightforward is it ever is, but there were three things that stood out for me here. The first was the first double-paged spread of the firefight; it puts forward the human-against-human part of the story (which helps distract from any possible zombie involvement), and it shows the odds that Rick and his people are fighting against, with the entirety of the army huddled behind just a couple of school buses. The second was the second double-paged spread, which gives us our first view of lots of zombies in a long while, and as a big ol’ indicator that Rick had a plan better than bleeding for the first time since 2012, it was an awesome thing to behold. And the third was the page of Negan looking through the fence at the impending zombie apocalypse; Adlard draws Negan mostly in shadow, with none of his trademark cockiness, which goes a long way toward convincing us that for once, we’re not gonna see Negan turn this situation around into yet another defeat for Rick from the jaws of victory. It’s very, very good stuff.

This issue’s not perfect. We still get to see Negan get himself a hostage, and both sides agree that there’s still more war to come, so I’m sure we’re gonna see Rick take another few shots to the nuts before this is all said and done. But for the first time in a long time, Kirkman lets us see our heroes win one. And that alone is worth being excited about for the time being. The pacing on The Walking Dead has been abominable recently, to the point where I’ve even been letting episodes of the TV show stack up on my TiVo because I’m afraid if I don’t, I’m gonna get nothing but exposition and setup. But finally we’ve got something happening. And it’s got me excited about the title for the first time in 2013. This one’s worth checking out.