In George Romero’s genre-creating first film, The Night of the Living Dead, a disparate group of people find themselves barricaded into a farmhouse after the onset of zombie infestation. To say that it doesn’t end well for them undersells the complicated and interwoven human drama on display in the film (however poorly acted it may be), drama which engineers the strongest and most remarkable tension in the film. The survivors, each dealing with independent emotional stakes, find themselves at constant odds as they attempt to survive the flesh-eating monstrosities literally banging at their door. Our two ostensible leads – Duane Jones’s Ben and Judith O’Dea’s Barbara – find their ends in what can be read as allegorical violence mirroring the violence facing Black men and women of any color in 1968 (and throughout history): Ben is shot on sight by a roving militia of white rednecks, and Barbara is bodily carried off into the violently clutching hands of many men.
The film set a precedent for the genre it created, establishing the zombie as an allegory for human violence; at its best, the genre finds that violence being inflicted with the zombies as a sort of background noise, an atmospheric condition. It’s mankind’s inherent distrust in one another that sows the seeds of each survivor’s grisly end.
The Walking Dead is famous for going to violent extremes, introducing and fetishizing absolute lunatics who leverage society’s collapse into a none-too-subtle study of power’s corruption, gruesome rulers over violent fiefdoms. Again and again, survivors find themselves under the influence of power-mad despots or in the clutches of conniving cannibals.
In most of The Walking Dead narrative, the allegory of mankind’s violence is illustrated by the exertion of someone else’s will upon those without power.
Not so in Tillie Walden’s masterful Clementine series. Sure, there was a bit of that in the first volume, but most often Clem undergoes a sort of interior violence, an earnest and self-abusing tendency for guilt under constant, unrelenting trauma.
Clem, perhaps more than any figure in the genre, illustrates a character showing very real psychological wear and tear. The events of her childhood – ruthlessly narrated over the course of three seasons in the Telltale Walking Dead games – inform her every decision, and plague her every thought. It inhibits her ability to trust any situation; it makes it impossible to open herself to the affection of others.
Clementine’s life has been an endless, exhausting slog from place to place, from one precarious survivor colony to another, all of which are doomed to collapse or disaster. Everyone she’s ever loved has been ground under the constant wave of societal violence. Clem, although she has lived through it, is no different.
The second volume of Walden’s series finds Clementine in another doomed colony. Despite having found a sort of nomadic home in the confines of her new family (Ricca, Olivia, and their cat), as well as the larger island community of which they have become a part, she is overwhelmed by a just-out-of-sight and out-of-mind presence of her ongoing trauma: a walled off contingency of the dead, ever awaiting its violent release. Consumed by her indomitable will to eradicate this problem, to answer the impossible question, she shuts herself down to the love she is growing with Ricca. She cannot trust even those who have been kind to her.
Tillie Walden’s artwork carries a charged sense of emotion – each character’s grief rings out from their faces, their small joys beaming. The dead, a constant nuisance, an endless droning presence, become more and more faceless. Everything glows with a feeling of earnest truth, however stylized and cartoonish. The characters of Clementine are rendered deep and emotionally real. Even as the characters undergo the gruesome climax of the narrative, they find a sort of faith, both in one another and in a half-remembered religious rite.
Clementine is not about racial violence or gender violence. It isn’t about the violence inflicted by people abusing power. But like Ben and Barbara before her, Clementine is beset by a very contemporary concern, one at the forefront of progressive thought: the reclamation of the self after trauma, and the healing power of opening oneself to others. As the series continues, it remains a crown jewel not just for The Walking Dead but for zombie fiction as a whole.
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