Rick is finally getting settled into his new life. He's got a roof over his head, and a pretty secure shelter, and he's surrounded by people who he's come to know as friends. Over all, life is good, and after the last few months he's been through he welcomes this change. But things can't stay like this forever. Something bad looms just beyond the horizon. Something really bad.

As Rick and his companions settle on the Greene family farm, Glenn finds new love, and the peace and safety of their new home is shattered by the dead.

In 2010, The Walking Dead premiered on AMC and has since become the most watched scripted program in the history of basic cable. Based on the graphic novel series by Robert Kirkman, The Walking Dead provides a stark, metaphoric preview of what the end of civilization might look like: the collapse of infrastructure and central government, savage tribal anarchy, and purposeless hordes of the wandering wounded. While the representation of zombies has been a staple of the horror genre for more than half a century, the unprecedented popularity of The Walking Dead reflects an increased identification with uncertain times. In The Walking Dead Live! Essays on the Television Show, Philip L. Simpson and Marcus Mallard have compiled essays that examine the show as a cultural text. Contributors to this volume consider how the show engages with our own social practices—from theology and leadership to gender, race, and politics—as well as how the show reflects matters of masculinity, memory, and survivor’s guilt. As a product of anxious times, The Walking Dead gives the audience an idea of what the future may hold and what popular interest in the zombie genre means. Providing insight into the broader significance of the zombie apocalypse story, The Walking Dead Live! will be of interest to scholars of sociology, cultural history, and television, as well as to fans of the show.

The epic tale of survival continues as Rick and crew find another possible shelter. This place is perfect: It's secure, it's large, it has nearly everything they could ever need. Only problem is, it's already got dead tenants...lots of 'em.

"Originally published in single magazine form as The walking dead #121-132."

An accessible introduction to the world of The Walking Dead, this book looks across platforms and analytical frameworks to characterize the fictional world of The Walking Dead and how its audiences make use of it. From comics and television to social media, apps, and mobile games, utilizing concepts derived from literary studies, media studies, history, anthropology, and religious studies, Matthew Freeman examines the functions and affordances of new digital platforms. In doing so, he establishes a new transdisciplinary framework for analyzing imaginary worlds across multiple media platforms, bolstering the critical arena of world-building studies by providing a greater array of vocabulary, concepts, and approaches. The World of The Walking Dead is an engaging exploration of stories, their platforms, and their reception, ideal for students and scholars of world-building, film and TV studies, new media, and everything in-between.

 From the beginning, both Robert Kirkman’s comics and AMC’s series of The Walking Dead have brought controversy in their presentations of race, gender and sexuality. Critics and fans have contended that the show’s identity politics have veered toward the decidedly conservative, offering up traditional understandings of masculinity, femininity, heterosexuality, racial hierarchy and white supremacy. This collection of new essays explores the complicated nature of relationships among the story’s survivors. In the end, characters demonstrate often-surprising shifts that consistently comment on identity politics. Whether agreeing or disagreeing with critics, these essays offer a rich view of how gender, race, class and sexuality intersect in complex new ways in the TV series and comics.

The zombie has cropped up in many forms--in film, in television, and as a cultural phenomenon in zombie walks and zombie awareness months--but few books have looked at what the zombie means in fiction. Tim Lanzendörfer fills this gap by looking at a number of zombie novels, short stories, and comics, and probing what the zombie represents in contemporary literature. Lanzendörfer brings together the most recent critical discussion of zombies and applies it to a selection of key texts including Max Brooks's World War Z, Colson Whitehead's Zone One, Junot Díaz's short story "Monstro, " Robert Kirkman's comic series The Walking Dead, and Seth Grahame-Smith's Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. Within the context of broader literary culture, Lanzendörfer makes the case for reading these texts with care and openness in their own right. Lanzendörfer contends that what zombies do is less important than what becomes possible when they are around. Indeed, they seem less interesting as metaphors for the various ways the world could end than they do as vehicles for how the world might exist in a different and often better form.

This edited collection brings together an introduction and 13 original scholarly essays on AMC's The Walking Dead. The essays in the first section address the pervasive bloodletting of the series: What are the consequences of the series' unremitting violence? Essays explore violence committed in self-defense, racist violence, mass lawlessness, the violence of law enforcement, the violence of mourning, and the violence of history. The essays in the second section explore an equally urgent question: What does it mean to be human? Several argue that notions of the human must acknowledge the centrality of the body--the fact that we share a "blind corporeality" with the zombie. Others address how the human is closely aligned with language and time, the disappearance of which are represented by the aphasic, timeless zombie. Underlying each essay are the game-changing words of The Walking Dead's protagonist Rick Grimes to the other survivors: "We're all infected." The violence of the zombie is also our violence; their blind drives are also ours. The human characters of The Walking Dead may try to define themselves against the zombies but in the end their bodies harbor the zombie virus: they are the walking dead. Instructors considering this book for use in a course may request an examination copy here.

The story of The Walking Dead chronicles the lives of a group of survivors in the wake of a zombie apocalypse. The Walking Dead is an Eisner-award winning comic book series by writer Robert Kirkman. Started in 2003, the comic book continues to publish monthly and has published a total of 92 issues. The popularity of this comic book series led to graphic novel publications (see competing titles) as well as the critically acclaimed TV adaptation on AMC. The Walking Dead is AMC's highest-rated show ever surpassing even Mad Men's ratings at its peak. Both the comic book series and TV show force us to confront our most cherished values and ask: would we still be able to hold onto these things in such a world? What are we allowed to do? What aren't we? Are there any boundaries left? The Walking Dead and Philosophy will answer these and other questions: Is it ok to "opt out?" Is it morally acceptable to abandon Merle? What happens to law in a post-zombie world? Does marriage have any meaning anymore? What duty do survivors have to each other?