Walking Dead 12: Relentless zombie comic offers respite, and its own problems

I've just read the twelfth collection in the chilling, gripping Walking Dead zombie comic series, Life Among Them, and as always, I raced through the pages, on edge to discover what happened next.

The Walking Dead is remarkable for both its relentless pacing and its relentless pessimism, a series in which the plight of characters who have endured the unimaginable nevertheless grows steadily and intractably worse. The trick, then, is to write a series in which things get monotonically worse and yet there always dangles the prospect of hope, a glimmer of light deep at the end of the tunnel.

In volume 12, the light grows considerably brighter as the nomadic survivors encounter a model walled community that seems too good to be true; the characters are now tried not by the zombies or homicidal rivals, but by the agonizing questions of trust, of returning to normalcy, of confronting the lives the led while on the road and fighting for their survival.

As always, I finished it slavering for more, and even now am eagerly awaiting the thirteenth collection.

Walking Dead Volume 12: Life Among Them