By: Robert Kirkman and Jay Bonansinga
The Story: The origin story of the man who would become the Governor, that wretched villain from The Walking Dead from issues in the mid-30’s up to issue #48.
Five things: [Note: This review has a SPOILERS for the comic series, book AND TV show.]
1. This is a catchy and quick read. This is the kind of book you can just inhale in an afternoon. I say this as a reader who has been struggling to finish A Game of Thrones for a few months. If you’re into The Walking Dead, you will motor though this with no trouble. It’s fun and gripping and doesn’t ask too much of the reader. When you finish this, you will have had a fun romp through the zombie infested Atlanta area and learn where the Governor came from. I heartily recommend it even if it seems like I’m picking nits below.
2. Might be a little more related to the TV show’s continuity than the comic book continuity. There is nothing too overt that I saw, but in terms of overall direction, we know that in the comic series, Rick Grimes sets out from a small town in Kentucky, travels to Atlanta and….. SPOILER…. heads back to Kentucky before ending up near Washington, DC in the current issues. He meets the Governor before going to Kentucky and since he was traveling roughly northeast, I always figured the the Governor’s township was somewhere northeasterly of Atlanta. But in this novel, the Governor’s town is put southwest of Atlanta. That seems problematic with the comic continuity (unless you think Rick was backtracking, which I doubt) but it fits with the TV show where the characters are traveling from Atlanta towards Fort Benning which is south-southwest of Atlanta. On one hand, complaining about stuff like this is majorly nerdy, but it does make this story feel like it isn’t really part of the comic narrative.
3. The writers delight in details, even if they aren’t accurate. Every reader has their own little areas that they know a hell of a lot about. And it is frustrating when a writer screws up facts unnecessarily. One of the writers has lots of fun reciting minute and inaccurate details about firearms. Rather than just saying the protagonists found “shotguns” the writers fling out lots of incorrect details about those shotguns. Later they do the same thing about the exact amount of horsepower a particular vehicle has when they could have just said, “powerful V8 engine.” This is the kinda of lazy writing that I don’t usually attribute to Kirkman, so I tend to blame it on his collaborator, but the editors should have some blame on them too. Some readers probably don’t care about this kind of thing, but it blows me right out of the story and I start looking things up on Wikipedia because I start to trust nothing that the author is telling me. My basic thing is, don’t write about it if you don’t really know what you’re talking about.
4. Starts too late. This story could have started with another chapter or two on the front and back ends and it wouldn’t have hurt my feelings. Now that we have The Walking Dead in novel form, it is very hard NOT to compare it to World War Z. WWZ really laid out how the zombies came about slowly over months and months. One zombie bites someone, a few days later that person gets sick, dies and becomes a zombie– rinse and repeat. The Walking Dead has never really made it clear how we ended up in this mess. It doesn’t seem like the dead crawling out of the graves and it isn’t clear how all these live people in their everyday clothes suddenly became zombies. With the comics, Rick just wakes up a month into the mess and we can accept that we don’t really know what’s up. But this novel bathes us in the early days (starting 3-4 days in) but doesn’t discuss what happened.
5. Wonderful twist at the end. You get a serious SPOILER WARNING here….. Not kidding….. Don’t keep reading if you don’t want to have the ending SPOILED….. Through this entire story, we follow a man named Phillip, his daughter Penny, Brian (Phillip’s brother) and one of Phillip’s childhood friends. We see Phillip start out as a bit of a rough redneck, but basically a decent man who really loves his daughter. Brian is the meek and mild brother who can barely bring himself to kill a zombie. Over the course of the novel, Phillip goes bad; really bad. As a reader, you can see The Governor in his behavior and it all clicks into place until Phillip is killed and Brian assumes his brother’s name. And, that is what makes the Governor so interesting. All along it was kinda tragic how Phillip was corrupted, but it is even more tragic when we learn that sweet and friendly Brian is really the guy who tortures and rapes Michonne in the comics. Again, we could have used another chapter or two to complete Brian’s transition. By the end, he is able to kill and has changed his name, but it’s still hard to see him as a brutal torturer and rapist.
Conclusion: Not heavy literature and not without flaws, Rise of the Governor still fills in some blanks for Walking Dead fans. And it is written in a very accessible and easy to read fashion.
Grade: C
– Dean Stell
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Conclusion