Will Maggie kill Rick? The Walking Dead loses yet another main character

Fans of the Walking Dead have only just processed the news that Andrew Lincoln is to leave the show following the ninth season, and now it has been revealed that Lauren Cohan’s is also to exit, after lengthy contract negotiations  failed to see her salary brought into line with those of her male co-leads, Andrew Lincoln (Rick) and Norman Reedus (Daryl).

The departure of the Rick character will now take the show the furthest it's ever been from the comic book source material -the show has always enjoyed an open relationship with the comics, mirroring plots faithfully right up until the point that it decides it doesn’t want to. The show isn’t afraid to deviate hugely from the comics to suit its purposes – one of the best examples is Carl’s death in season eight, which wasn’t in the comics at all. Rick, too, is still alive  in the comics, so Lincoln’s departure will represent the biggest branching-off from Kirkman’s original storylines to date. Yet, because the character of Daryl isn’t even in the comics, and Rick doesn’t have any family ties left besides baby Judith, subbing Daryl into Rick’s comic-book storylines means they can continue to mine the comics for Rick’s narratives without having to come up with more new storylines for Daryl.

The Walking Dead really needs to end with Rick's departure, so that it can take its place in history as one of the great TV shows. In recent years it's lost a lot of its former glory and I can't help feeling that for it to limp on without the main focus of the series, that would be Rick, that the legacy will be destroyed.


Twitter seems to agree:

“I think that when we got the news that Carl was dying on the show, it felt like very much a bookend of a much bigger journey that began in the hospital.” Lincoln said  at Comiccon in April.


Not much is known of Rick's final end but it is expected that the character will die, and one possible storyline being mooted is that Maggie will become the all out villain in the next season , which should at least be interesting given that the Negan character, following a promising start, turned out to be such a let down. Will Maggie kill Rick? Now that would step that the show runners may not be brave enough to take, but it would certainly be a WTF moment that would be talked about for years to come. The show has always claimed that no character is safe and maybe it is time to make good on that claim.

Speaking words of wisdom....'Fucking A'

'I hope you’re wearing your shitting pants right now.'

Since debuting in The Walking Dead comic series and smash-hit AMC television show, the baseball bat-wielding badass known as Negan has quickly become a fan favorite for his crude humor, violent tendencies, and salty language

A new book, The Quotable Negan, brings together his  best lines along with fun facts and incredible stats to create the ultimate homage to an iconic villain. From Skybound Books, The Quotable Negan is now up for pre-order. The first 1,000 to pre-order via the Skybound web store will receive a bookplate signed by Robert Kirkman.

Walkers, walkers everywhere 2 - Essential Tales of the Zombie

I picked up this graphic novel in my local Borders during it’s closing down sale a few years back – man, I miss my Borders but now it’s gone forever, the chain deader than the undead.  So sad, but there were some bargains to be had during those last few weeks and I spent a couple of hundred pounds in the space of a fortnight but must have come away with more than a grands worth of books and DVD’s. Tales of the Zombie was one of those bargains.

Bound in an attractive softback the book collects together zombie strips from issues 1 – 10 of Tales of the Zombie and Dracula Lives issues 1 and 2. The creative team  consists of Roy Thomas, Steve Gerber, Doug Moench and Gene Colan, as well as several others. The original Tales of the Zombie comic ran from 1973-1975 and told of Simon Garth, a man who was reanimated by mystical means and now find himself under the control of whoever holds the fabled amulet.

The WIKI tell us -
Simon William Garth ,  became a work-obsessed executive of Garth Manor, based in New Orleans. Ambushed and kidnapped by his former gardener, whom he had fired, Garth is to be a cult’s human sacrifice. However, the cult’s priestess, Layla, recognizes Garth as her own everyday-life employer, with whom she is in love. Though her attempt to let him escape is thwarted, and though she is forced to mystically transform his corpse into a zombie with a clouded mind whom holders of the matching amulet could control, Layla, with her grandfather, Papa Doc Kabel, continue to try to help the uncomprehending Zombie reach his final rest.Despite his zombie state, he retains some vestige of his soul: for instance, when under the control of the amulet he has been forced to hurt or even kill people he has come to care about (such as Philip Bliss and Layla), the moment he is free from control his vengeance is terrible. Because of these remnants of soul, Layla and Papa Doc perform a ritual that allows Garth 24 hours in his restored human self in order that he might attend the wedding of his daughter Donna and set what was left of his previous life in order.

The graphic novel is a great collection and as well as the stories there are several text based articles – The Sensuous Zombie looks at the way the undead have been presented over the years,  there’s a look at Voodoo in all its forms, and a great article on George Romero’s Living Dead. The graphic novel retails at £10.99 and is well worth seeking out for some great vintage zombie adventure.

RELATED:The first volume in The Dead Walked trilogy was delayed due to a massive rewrite being required when the third book took on a turn unexpected during the initial plotting – still there’s a lot of swill out there and I wanted the Dead Walked books to be as good as I could make them before making them available to you, the reader. I plan to develop the Vincent Stark name and the only way to do that is to ensure the work produced is of the highest quality and will grab readers by the throat, not letting up until the story ends.

And so January 5th 2011 the dead will finally walk.

The Dead Walked: Outbreak

By Gary Dobbs, author of a string of bestselling westerns as well as the historical crime thriller A Policeman’s Lot, writing under the name of Vincent Stark
Available in all eFormats and from Amazon, Smashwords, Barnes & Noble  and anywhere else eBooks are sold.

Walking Dead - Mid season climax

If you’re not up to speed with AMC’s Walking Dead then you’d best not read this review as it contains big SPOILERS.

Well the mid season climax turned out be one of the best episodes this season’s yet offered  and  although the big secret was given away by an AMC employee who has since been sacked, it was still a brilliant reveal to see Sophia, now a walker, emerge from Hershel’s barn. And the entire episode that carried us towards this climax was expertly paced and allowed us to see just how fragmented our group of survivors have become. Shane continued to dominate proceedings as one by one all of the major characters came to realise that whilst Rik may be the better man, it is Shane who is better equipped to help them survive in this brutal new world. We got the inevitable soap operatics with Shane confronting Lori, now that Rik has told him she is pregnant, and telling her that the baby is his. When Lori dismisses him and tells him that even if he is the father, the baby will be Rik’s he goes off in a black mood. He goes for the guns, intending on destroying the walkers in Hershal’s barn but finds that Dale expected this move and has gone off to hide the guns,so that Shane can not act before Rik returns from wherever he’s gone. This seems an odd move for Dale, he did after all try to make Hershel realize that the walkers are dangerous and can no longer be considered people,  to make which is perhaps the only weak point in this otherwise excellent episode.

And where is Rik? Out in the swamps that’s where aiding Hershal to capture two walkers who have been trapped in the swam. The plan is to take the walkers back to the farm  for storage in the barn, but by the time he and the old man, not the mention the two new walkers return, Shane has already found Dale, retrieved the guns and is preparing to destroy every single walker in the barn. Cue an action scene that really delivered – it becomes a turkey shoot as Shane and several of the survivors stand there and put each and every walker down while Hershal looks on horrified, but just as the dust settles Sophia shambles out of the barn and it is left to Rik, rather than a stunned Shane, to put her down. Perhaps it is Rik after all, who is the best man for this brutal new world.


A great episode then that displayed much of the action that has thus far been  missing from this season. There were some great character moments but it wasn’t at the expense of the all important zombie apocalyspe elements that have been missing from this season. It certainly did it’s job and it’s going to be a long wait until the season resumes in January.

The second season has been disappointing thus far and has constantly failed to live up to the excellence of the first season – the search for Sophia has gone on too long and has tended to make things a little too draggy, but now that this plot line has been played out  maybe the next section of this season will see some all out zombie action, and that the sense of doom so prevalent in the first season will return. AMC have already announced that there will be a third season, and if the remainder of this second season lives up to the brilliance of this episode then I, for one, will be glad to see it.