A few years ago I was sent an unsolicited review copy of Tillie Walden’s memoir Spinning. It was about how she found out she was gay and did figure skating. I think she was 22 when she produced this “memoir”, not much older than she was in the book itself. This is why memoirs are usually suited for people who have lived a life or had some extraordinary experience, neither of which applies to Spinning. It’d be like if I ate a bagel, stared into the middle distance and then wrote a 400 page book about it. I read about half of it (it actually was 400 pages long!), laughed at how utterly inane and empty Spinning was and tossed it into the book donation bag I give to my local charity shop when it’s full.
As unimpressed as I was with Walden’s comic (because of Spinning I hadn’t bothered looking at any of her other comics, even if one of them won an Eisner - I find awards rarely denote quality and tend to reward politics), I decided to check out her latest, Clementine, Book One, purely because it’s a Walking Dead spinoff (all things considered, I’m a fan of Robert Kirkman’s series - yes there was a lotta crap but also a lotta good). Well, that’s what I get for not doing any research because it turns out Clementine is a spinoff of The Walking Dead… Telltale game, not Kirkman’s comics series. Ugh…
For those of you who don’t know what Telltale games were, they were an unholy mashup of point and click games and animated movies, that neither satisfied as a game or a movie. The experience was like watching an extended cut scene that occasionally prompted you to press “X” - that was often the “game” aspect. I played about 30 minutes of the Batman Telltale game, was bored the whole time, quit and never played it again. You’ll be shocked to know that this godawful format didn’t go the distance and Telltale went bankrupt a while ago.
So I didn’t play the Walking Dead Telltale game and I have no idea who Clementine is or why anyone cares; I’m clearer now about who she is but remain baffled as to the caring part. In this book she’s a moody teen amputee who meets an Amish kid called Amos whose rumspringa involves travelling to a Vermont mountain and helping strangers build a house or something and getting a plane ride in return. Clem tags along because plot.
The story is never once interesting. You’d think an amputee might struggle with fending off the zombie hordes but, no, Clem manages just fine. I mean, if the zombies are that easy to get rid of and serve zero purpose, they may as well not be there. Clem and Amos are joined by a pair of twins and a girl with glasses and, after a certain point, they all start to look the same - even Amos - and, coupled with Walden’s downright abysmal storytelling, I found that a major character had somehow died or wandered off a number of pages previously and I didn’t even notice!
All of the characters are uninteresting nobodies - they’re all moody teens, hooray… - and, again because plot, one of the characters goes bad for no reason and that’s the finale: some dumb scuffle between idiots over nothing. So many of the panels are crammed with overstuffed word balloons and still the story came off murky and unengaging - that’s how bad a writer Walden is.
Clementine, Book One is a dismal comic that I wouldn’t recommend to anyone, least of all Walking Dead fans - if anything, this book will give you a new appreciation for even the worst books in Kirkman’s run, which were never as mind-numbingly dull as this.
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