The Walking Dead (comics)/Fridge

Fridge Brilliance

• At first, I gave the title "Walking Dead no second look. It's a pretty common name for a zombie, or any type of ghoul really. But then I realized the book isn't really about zombies. They're more or less cannon fodder, and in the worst cases, the equivalent of a natural disaster; which is bad, yes, and scary, yes. But worst and scarier are the human, living characters. The book isn't just about a group of survivors dealing with zombies. It's more than that; its about survivors dealing with other survivors. And more people have been killed from the other human characters than that have died because of a zombie. The zombies are endless and faceless, and they will be around for the duration of the series. Some characters, as the book has shown, will not. After understanding all of this, I realized that "The Walking Dead" doesn't refer to the zombies, at least, not exclusively. "The Walking Dead" are the human beings. "The Walking Dead" are the heroes. Which, given what this implies, makes the whole series even more grim.

Fridge Horror

• Issue 48: during the Governor's assault of the prison, Lori and Judith were killed.
  • Consider: the fatal shot hit Lori. Her brain was not damaged. If she's lucky, the zombies devoured her corpse. If not, there might be half a reanimated Lori crawling around.
  • And then there was Judith. We saw the shot killing her mother, but there was no absolute indication that it killed the baby. If she's lucky, she was also killed by the gunshot. If not—and if Lori didn't get to reanimate—she and her mother would be devoured by the swarm of zombies. And yes, it can get worse: just imagine what would happen if Lori reanimated but Judith didn't. And yes, it can get further worse. If the gunshot killed but didn't destroy Judith's cranium, we just might have ourselves a zombie baby and its half-corpse zombie mum there in the prison...
    • Actually, the woman who shot Lori clearly yells at the Governor "You made me kill a fucking baby!" Most likely Judith was crushed under her mother's corpse, since she was barely a month old and babies are very brittle.
• Something that hasn't been addressed yet in the comics. Consider, whatever it is that reanimates the dead is possibly airborne, and everyone has it: thus, even if one dies of other causes he/she will still reanimate. Consider, the chance of miscarriages is that much higher in that world, due to (relative) lack of medical care, stress, etc. Now imagine if a baby is stillborn, or dies during childbirth...
• And one more thing. Again, recall that everyone can/will reanimate upon death, unless the brain is destroyed. Now imagine that a lot of people are scared and barely barricaded themselves against hordes of undead. Then, in the middle of the night, someone has a heart attack and dies. Bam! Suddenly there is a zombie right next to you. All it takes is a sudden sickness, or lack of medicine (e.g. diabetics), or just old age to claim someone, and suddenly your crammed safezone is breached—from within. Quite possibly, this contributes to many 'contained area' or 'safezones' to be overrun.
  • And do recall that, in the TV series, there was the gang protecting the retirement home, with old and possibly medically-dependent people. While (as far as I know) this hadn't happened, it was and still is a very real possibility.
    • In the show, apparently the only way to become a zombie is to be bitten by another one.
      • Not anymore.
• The Walking Dead contains lots of Nightmare Fuel already, but The Governor takes the cake in this category. Among the many nasty things he does, he collects the severed heads of those he's killed to feed his "biters" and sticks them in tanks, then sits and watches them complaining "there's nothing on TV these days." Nasty, right? Then you remember that anyone killed, bitten or not, rises as a zombie... and even after decapitation, the head is still animate unless the brain is destroyed...
  • And then there's the scene with zombies in the basement at the house at Wiltshire Estates. One wonders how the zombies got down there in the first place. Then, later, it's revealed that it's not the bite that turns people... any death will turn you into a zombie. So it's quite likely that those were the original owners of the house, who hid in the basement for safety and died of starvation. *shiver*

Fridge Logic

• So, why exactly does everyone have such a hard time keeping track of the time since Z-day? Rick couldn't have been in a coma too long (any longer and he'd have been dead, not to mention that at the beginning, he's shown with a kind of two- or three- weeks scruff going on, not a months-old beard), so why the hell does everyone forget the time and/or date? Did the initial panic cause everyone to destroy every single clock and calendar around in their efforts to survive?
  • If you take people out of their normal routine, they very easily lose track of time and days. Think about when you go on vacation for two weeks, and you're doing something entirely out of the ordinary. It's disorienting for most people, and you'll wake up forgetting what day it is. Pair that with our reliance on mechanical and electronic time-keeping, and you've got people whose world is turned on its head, they're not doing anything remotely like their normal routine, and all those digital time displays—computers, banks, etc.--are no longer working.
    • I've owned digital watches with a calender function in them before that had battery life of well over a year and a half. Of all the survivors they've run into, not one of them has something like that?

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