I talked a bit,
after the season finale, about how, as high as the bodycount is in both the book and the comic, they nonetheless have to play by certain rules. The comic is written for the trades; you're not going to see a major character die in the second issue of a 6-issue arc.
And another thing occurred to me today: while #112 set up a perfect narrative moment to finally kill Rick off, and #113 is the penultimate issue of this arc and therefore a good spot for a big fuck-you cliffhanger, I knew Rick wasn't going to die for one simple reason: I hadn't seen a single "Holy shit you guys you guys The Walking Dead oh shit" headline on any comics news site today.
If The Walking Dead killed off its main character, that wouldn't just be all over comics news sites, it would show up in the mainstream press, too -- much less politely and with little or no proper spoiler warning, I might add.
What #113 is -- well, I'm going to put a spoiler warning here, but really the spoilers I'm about to give aren't about anything that happened so much as things that didn't happen.
What #113 is is a People Stand Around Talking and the Issue Ends Exactly Where it Started issue. I think it speaks both to Kirkman's greatest strength and greatest weakness as a storyteller -- this is some serious fucking decompressed trade-writing going on, and as much as he's ratcheted up the stakes you could skip this issue entirely and not miss a goddamn thing.
BUT, it still managed to preserve the tension, still managed to make my heart beat faster. I think that counts for something.
I really liked how Negan was played in this issue, too -- this is as off-the-deep-end-crazy as we've ever seen him, but he's crazy like a fox. He never loses control -- he screams and he curses and he talks about rubbing his dick on his baseball bat, but at no point does he get sloppy or make a mistake. It's an interesting contrast to the Governor, or at least the TV version of him, who seemed so tightly controlled and then just fucking snapped and blew everything he had in a single moment of anger. Maybe there's something to be said here about catharsis -- the Governor took command as a burden and hid his true nature from most of the people around him, while Negan delights in being top dog and not only is he not afraid of scaring or disgusting people, he takes utter glee from it.
And while I suppose it does sort of border on speckling the fourth wall again, when he explains outright that he's not going to kill Rick, his reasoning is sound. Rick's the leader; if he makes him a martyr then he's in for a world of shit, so really the only option he's got is to break his spirit. And he knows his only chance of that is to kill Carl, so that's going to be his focus now.
Anyhow. The next arc is All-Out War, so I think it's pretty reasonable to assume that Rick and Negan are both going to survive next month.
It's interesting ground to tread; of all this book's done in 113 issues, it's never really gotten into a legitimate war between two settlements. The Governor's attack on the prison and Rick's disposal of the cannibals don't count; those were not even contests, they were slaughter. What we're looking at here is something altogether more interesting -- two groups that are somewhat evenly-matched, both planning ahead for what's coming.
We saw a little bit of it in the skirmishes between Woodbury and the prison last season on the show, but this is going to be a lot bigger than that. We're talking two actual armies at this point -- small ones, sure, but still a lot bigger than any group of people we've seen prior to now.
