The Walking Dead #1 (Online Comics ), Poster #2

 

The Walking Dead is an American monthly black and white comic published by Image Comics beginning in 2003. The comic was created by writer Robert Kirkman and artist Tony Moore (replaced by Charlie Adlard from issue #7 onward) and chronicles the travels of a group of people trying to survive in a world stricken by a zombie apocalypse.
Synopsis

The Walking Dead is centered around a small-town police officer from Cynthiana, Kentucky, his family, and a number of other survivors who have banded together in order to survive after the world is overrun with zombies. As the series progresses, the characters become more developed, and their personalities shift under the stress of a zombie apocalypse. Fighting growing despair — and occasionally each other — the group searches for a secure location which they can finally call home.

Days Gone Bye (issues #1-6)

The story opens with Rick Grimes and his partner Shane in a gunfight with an escaped convict. While trying to disarm the criminal, Rick gets shot and blacks out. When he awakes an unspecified time later, he finds himself in a hospital bed, completely alone.

Finding the hospital abandoned, Grimes sets off to find out where everyone went. He finds the hospital’s cafeteria crowded with the living dead, and barely escapes with his life. He returns to his home, only to find it abandoned as well — and he catches a shovel in the back of the head. When he awakens, again, he discover that a young boy named Duane Jones had hit him, believing him to be a zombie. After a brief introduction, Duane’s father Morgan explains what has happened while Rick was comatose: a plague of the dead has swept all civilization. Duane and Morgan have taken up in Rick’s neighbor’s house, hoping to ride it out.

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Rick allows Morgan access to the police armory and a squad car, hoping it will help them survive. Then, Rick makes for Atlanta, Georgia, believing his wife Lori and son Carl went there to find shelter. When Rick reaches Atlanta, he finds a scene of utter carnage: bodies stacked chest-high, ruined military equipment rusting in the street. He is soon surrounded by zombies, and escapes alive thanks only to the aid of a young man named Glenn. Glenn leads Rick to an encampment outside the city, where he meets several other survivors as well as his family and Shane: shoe salesman Allen, his wife Donna and twin children Billy and Ben; Dale, a traveling salesman and older man whose RV is used by the group for a base; mechanic Jim whose family was killed by zombies; Carol, a single mother, and her daughter Sophia; and finally, college junior Amy with her sister, ex-clerk Andrea.

Rick adapts quickly to life in the encampment, soon becoming its de facto leader alongside Shane. He and Glenn daringly raid a gun store in the city, avoiding detection by rubbing pieces of a zombie on their clothes and skin to smell like a zombie. Rick teaches the group to shoot — including his son Carl (against Lori’s wishes). The training comes in handy when the camp is beset by zombies; unfortunately, Amy is killed, and Jim is bitten, which will eventually change him into one of the monsters. He decides to be left behind as the group moves on, believing that if he becomes a zombie, he will be reunited with his family in some way.

Jim performs a eulogy at Amy’s funeral, while Rick finds himself at odds with his partner, Shane, who wishes to stay behind. Rick argues that the camp is unsafe so close to the city and that the coming winter will soon make hunting impossible. Rick also hears rumors that Shane is infatuated with Lori. Things come to a head when Rick confronts Shane in the forest while hunting. Shane informs Rick that “he should have stayed dead”, and how he wasn’t supposed to come back. Rick is unaware that while he was gone, Shane had an affair with Lori. Shane feels that everything will be okay if he kills Rick. In an attempt to defend his father, Carl kills Shane by shooting him in the throat. He remarks, crying, that “It isn’t like killing the dead ones.” Rick, in tears, replies “It never should be, son. It never should be.”

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