The shitshow that is The Walking Dead staggers on for yet another volume in the aptly named, Volume 31: The Rotten Core. Who knew that the Commonwealth, an authoritarian group obsessed with hierarchy enforced through an overbearing police presence, would turn out to be gasp kinda evil oh right everyone duurrr?!
Rick is taking Commonwealth Governor Pamela Milton on a tour of their territories (Hilltop, The Kingdom, etc.) except it’s not interesting for the audience who’s already familiar with them all - great storytelling, Robert Kirkman! Elsewhere, Sophia complains to Carl that there aren’t enough eligible boys around to date - cue a McLovin-type intro’d! Gee, wonder what gonna happen dere… Eugene decides to make trains a thing again, Princess continues to be annoying and Michonne becomes a lawyer again, fighting a stupid, dreary court case.
Kirkman throws in a couple of zombie-killin’ scenes in a futile attempt to make all this dross less dross-tastic, though even he’s aware of how formulaic the series has become, having a couple of characters remark on the peace/war ebb and flow of things. Guess Rick and co. are gonna haveta fight the Commonwealth now… or are they? Sort of. Le sigh...
So why doesn’t this get the lowest possible rating? Rick. Rick saves the day by being unintentionally hilarious and behaving like a moron! There’s one scene where he’s having coffee in the Commonwealth where I turned the page and saw this extra-large panel close-up of Rick’s face that looked like he’d been clobbered on the bonce by a football - he had this dazed expression and his eyes were streaming.
Obviously he hadn’t and it was meant to be this moving moment where he got to experience his normal pre-zombie apocalypse life for the first time in years, but that we were meant to take it seriously only made it funnier to me. Fucking hell, Charlie Adlard, that was your best effort? Wow. Made me laugh though!
Rick’s words that close out this book were also so corny - think similar lines to earlier in the series when he said “WE’RE the Walking Dead!”. And then there’s his actions in the final scene which were unpredictable and, despite being over the top, about the only interesting part of the book - hopefully that means Kirkman’s figuring out a new variation for the story?
There’ve been worse volumes in The Walking Dead but Volume 31: The Rotten Core is still down there as among the series’ worst - the title’s quality drought unfortunately continues.
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