3 Late Blogs

So I went back and reread volume 1 of The Walking Dead which was definitely worth revisiting. While there are a lot of very tense zombie moments, particularly when Rick and Glenn go into Atlanta to get more guns, the real focus of this first issue is on human relationships and how everybody in the camp has to support each other to survive. We see the value of support and companionship in many ways. Multiple times in the comic, one character saves another from a zombie attack demonstrating the importance of teamwork. Rick and his family are spotlighted and even though he and his wife disagree about whether Carl should have a gun, plus that nasty business with Shane, you see how much they care about each other and how essential that is. There is a sweet moment where the whole camp sits around the fire and shares their backstories. They are all united by losing loved ones which reinforces their need to stick together. Those who lost families find new ones in the community. All except Jim, who gets bitten, and Shane who goes crazy and tries to kill Rick before Carl saves him.

Moving on, the first three chapters of World War Z, up through "Blame" show how poorly people respond to the warning signs of what ends up being a global catastrophe. People in this chapter are skeptical of the scope of the problem or even disbelieving that a problem actually exists. Nobody, save Israel, attempts to solve the problem or offer strategies, everyone is thinking far too narrowly and in these chapters we see how people allow the infection to spread because they can't be bothered to try and stop it. One particular example of this is the doctor in the Amazon Rain Forrest chapter. The doctor in this chapter had no idea what was going on as it was just the beginning but he explains how the people that were infected were just quietly covered up and nobody investigated what had happened. On top of that he explains how he got his organs from the black market, which was extremely unregulated and if the people who were working within it knew about the infection, they didn't do anything about it so that the operation could continue. The doctor who is narrating seems like he did care somewhat but even he at the end of the chapter, reflects that he didn't tell anyone or take further action because he was more concerned with rebuilding his reputation.

The next section, The Great Panic, is one of the most chaotic parts of the book because in this section the virus has gone global and is causing major havoc but at this point in the story nobody has any idea what to do about it, they're just panicking. People are trying to protect themselves or escape, despite the fact that there wasn't any place to escape to in most cases. One of the most bizarre and interesting stories from this part of the book is the one about all of the celebrities who shacked up in a house together on Long Island and broadcast the whole experience. It really shows how poorly those people were thinking, sort of treating the whole thing as a game or spectacle because they had resources and fame. They thought that they could just hire a few people to protect them from the zombies and go on living their lives as celebrities. They never even considered the possibility of a threat from other living humans who didn't have all that they did and were scared and probably bitter at how cavalier the celebrities were being. People just had no idea how big this thing was yet.