"The Walking Dead" - TV Show vs Comics

On 31st of October, we met “The Walking Dead” TV show. It created a huge interest and positive critics. This week second episode is aired on AMC.

As a fan of TWD comics, after I watched the first episode so many thoughts came to my mind about comics vs tv show. In this post, I’ll just make a quick comparison for the first episode because second episode is being aired on most of the world.

(SPOILER!!!)

I was sure expecting differences between the comics and tv show. This sould be done in order to create a tv show with new scenes, side stories and additional characters.

My observations are; in the comics what happened before the hospital is told in one page. In tv show during opening scene, characters tried to be represented more with extra action scenes. This was something so natural, but there are two points in tv show that stands totally different comparing to comics atmosphere. First one is Rick’s relationship between his wife is reflected poor in tv show which creates a reasonable background for Lori’s affair with Shane. In the comics Lori loves her husband but the loneliness and protective support that she felt makes her to have sexual relationship with Shane for one night After that Shane pushes her to keep on this relationship but Lori doesn’t act supportive to him. I believe that this revised love triangle isn’t so creative as it’s in the comics. Second one is the professionalism of the police team during the chase sceen, because in the comics the town that Rick is living is told as small and police team has nothing much to do. This approach makes more dramatic expectations during monitoring Rick’s change on his adventure.

In the first episode we see that Rick is easily killing zombies till he revisits the half zombie crawling in the park. In the comics the first human/zombie that Rick kills is this half zombie and during that moment he feels mixed emotions. This is reflected very well in the tv show but before that scene we see Rick is killing two zombies very cruelly. This is sure done for action but this totally changes Rick character and approach what he’s going to experience.

Additional scenes such as black families zombie wife/mother relation was very successful and changed zombie attach in Atlanta is really cool. In Atlanta scene, there is a tank that saves Rick which is not in the comics.

As a result, first episode was satisfactory. For the comic fans, we should wait a little bit more for to understand where the show is heading to. Is it going to be an adaptaion or an inspiration?