If you haven’t read The Walking Dead # 100 do NOT read this review because I will spoil the living fuck out of it.

Okay, with that out of the way…..

I’m a big pile of mixed emotions as I write this review. I read The Walking Dead # 100 last night and I’ve been thinking about it ever since. Like an annoying song that you can’t seem to get out of your head, issue 100 is staying with me, nagging me, haunting me.

And this a good thing. For me, the sign that I’ve just watched, read, listened to something great, as opposed to something just good, is that I’m still thinking about it the next day. This doesn’t happen very often in the comic book world. Most of the time I read my comics and afterwards bag them up and file them away in my long box. But there are a few series that stick with me. A few stories that rattle around in my brain long after I’ve read them – for good or bad reasons – but the fact that they are lingering is significant. The fact that it is making me think and feel is monumental.

When Glenn died I truly hated The Walking Dead comic book series. I felt a revulsion in the pit of stomach that made me rethink why I read this comic. I felt sadness, and anger, and shook my head in disgust. “I don’t want to see this”, I thought to myself. Why is Kirkman rubbing Glenn’s death in our faces?

Because this comic book has been about rubbing our faces in it from the start, I just forgot that. Main characters die all the fucking time in this series. Shit, Carl had half his face blown off. Why now am I feeling this way towards a characters death? Because Glenn was the closest character to “US” that The Walking Dead had.

The other characters that have died horrible deaths, Dale, Hershel, Tyreese, all fantastic characters and it sucked when then bit it, but it always felt that those deaths moved the story along and I never felt a connection with them. They were larger then life characters that comic books need. Heroes. I’m not a hero. So when Tyreese gets his head chopped off? While I think, “that sucks. He was an awesome dude”, I’m not to terribly shocked or surprised. But when a character like Glenn gets his head bashed in with a baseball bat, I want to throw the fucking comic to the ground and walk away. Because that guy was me. Because I in a weird sick way, Robert Kirkman, in the course of 98 issues, made me love Glenn. And now he’s dead. I will no longer get to read about Glenn. He’s gone and that fucking sucks. And I’m fucking pissed off about it.

and then there is that full page, close up spread of Glenn dying. I’m pretty sure Charile Adlard is having reoccurring nightmares over that drawing. Horrible shit man. But this a horror comic first and foremost. And a zombie horror comic to boot. Gore goes with the territory.

I just wish I didn’t care so much.