Pat Shand 2008-03-13
0 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
At best, "The Walking Dead" is a mediocre comic with bad moments and good moments written by a less-than-competent writer and pencilled by an artist whose panels range from good to pretty bad. At worst, it's a piece of sexist trash trying to pass for an epic, character-driven series. Which do I think it is? Recently, I'm leaning towards the latter, but I think the overall series is somewhere in-between.
"The Heart's Desire," the fourth volume of this series, has a better story than the previous installment. The dialogue remains horrible, reducing the majority of the characters to one-dimension exposition machines, but at least there was some promising bits of story. There's a new--and possibly crazy--woman who arrives and stirs up some muck between some characters, Rick is pressed to make a pretty rough decision early on (which has some backlash), and the 'mythology' of this zombie-infested world and how the infection works is explored a little bit. It was always--as usual--very easy to put down, which really isn't a good sign, but there was less stuff to get frustrated over. It actually seemed as if Kirkman had decided to stop giving every single issue an archaic and sexist spin...
...until the final issue included in this volume.
In the final issue, (don't worry, this isn't a spoiler) the team decides to form a committee of four people who will make all the decisions. All four people are men. That bugged me, but I thought Kirkman was about to save himself and make a statement AGAINST sexism (which has been a HUGE issue in the series so far) when a character says, "No women?" But how does Kirkman justify this decision? The women didn't want to be involved in the decision making. They just want to be protected. I don't know what era this man thinks he's living in, but things don't work that way. He's trying to make a statement that if the world was taken over by flesh-eating monsters, that men would assume the role of the "decision makers" and that women would simply knit and watch the children, as the women of "The Walking Dead" do.
Not only will this bother women who read this, it will bother anyone who has a problem with sexism. Period. At this point, I'm not even sure if I can continue reading this.
4/10
