The Walking Dead Should Crawl Back in the Grave

So if you haven't watched or read the Walking Dead and you'd like to be surprised by an old series now is the time to go someplace else. 

I read the Walking Dead comic collections a couple of years ago during lunch at a local Books-a-Million and got through volume 8 or 9. The series, at that time, was well written and beautifully illustrated but made not one damned bit of sense for anyone who is acquainted with the Southeastern United States. Let's not get ahead of ourselves here as some people might not know why that is. The comic follows Rick Grimes and his hapless group of survivors through the zombie apocalypse. The story actually starts in Kentucky where Grimes is a policeman who gets shot and wakes up in the hospital after the world has gone to hell. He manages to make his way out of the hospital and is soon found by another pair of survivors who take him in and catch him up. He then makes a break for Atlanta on horseback after having raided the sheriff's station for weapons and his uniform.

So far, so good.

Here's where things start to go off the rails and where, as a Southerner, I have to wonder what world Robert Kirkman lives in. Rick's travel down to Atlanta is filled with zombies and empty cars without guns in their back windows or crazy rednecks shooting everything that moves from their porches while country music echoes down the valley. And while I'm sure you can scream, "It's the zombie apocalypse they're all dead!" That's where you're wrong. Having grown up where feuds are still a reality I'm telling you that if the opportunity to shoot your neighbor in his stupid face without consequences comes along the South has a gun for that. 

This an area of the country where guns outnumber people and most everywhere you go you'll find someone either packing or having their rifle hanging in the back of their truck cab. In church? Yep. In restaurants? Yep. In banks? You bet. On a date? Odds are they're both packing.

"Oh, but that's just the rural South," I hear some of you say as you shake your heads. Well where do you think Rick Grimes is riding his horse through? No matter which highway or interstate he comes along to get to Atlanta he'll be riding through the rural South. An area of the country where hunting your own meal or brewing illegal liquor isn't a forgotten pastime. He should be passing survivors everywhere he turns as people refuse to leave their homes and instead started loading more shells so they shoot the hell out of the next shambling zombie to step on their property. But not so in Kirkman's South. There apparently everyone forgets their distrust of the government and blindly goes wherever they're told - because that's totally what would happen.

Oh, but let's say that it actually did happen and everyone loaded up in their cars and headed to the quarantine zones. Rick rides along on his horse passing countless cars with dead corn gobblers sitting behind the driving wheel and groaning fly catchers shuffling along after him. During all that traveling he doesn't see anyone with fully automatic rifles that they've made with kits at gun shows that you can buy most any day of the week. And he doesn't see guns in the back of pickup trucks or the thousands of handguns strapped to peoples' sides and hips. He doesn't see any militiamen decked out in cameo smoking weed and talking about how it was all a government plot by Obama to take their guns. Nope, friends, he doesn't see any of that.

You know what he does see? A zombie kid.

Then we get to Atlanta where all the survivors who are left haven't been able to get any real weapons on hand. No bow hunters, riflemen, range shooters, gang members, squirrel hunters, pellet shooters, or hunters of any sort in Georgia. Not a single one from Tennessee or Kentucky made it that far with their weapons either. 'Cause that makes a lot of fucking sense

 

You know what, fuck it. It's a good read even if it makes as much sense as a two year old high on mountain dew and straight sugar.