The Walking Dead, Volume 07: The Calm Before

The prison group gets a short respite from terrible people following their escape from Woodbury. They have a lot of sex and think about the future - sometimes with grievous results. And a baby is born!

This is my favorite of the series so far. It's so much more poignant when compared with the violence that precedes and follows it.

Much of The Calm Before focused on the survivors engaging in pre-apocalypse behaviors. A wedding, a birth, a basketball game, some gardening, "shopping", choosing which movie to watch next and the like. As the title suggests, their opportunity to indulge in the little things they took for granted before the zombie outbreak was inevitably short-lived, leading up to a not-too-surprising last page attack.

Of course, it wouldn't be an installment of The Walking Dead without bloodshed, of the completely unexpected and same-stuff-another-day variety. Even with Michonne's mounting emotional problems, she can still be counted on to butcher foes, both undead and alive. Complacency proves to be a danger, which thankfully motivates those remaining show more to remember that the danger beyond the fence is still just as dangerous while they are safely inside.

Carol, crazy, desperate Carol has grown on me the last few volumes. Her need for love outgrew her need for survival a long time ago. She's at her needy best here and seems as though she may have finally found the acceptance she was craving, if in a really bizarre fashion.

The Calm Before was a good deal less thrilling than some previous installments of The Walking Dead, but I was pleased with the end result. Given how the future seems to be panning out for the survivors, this may be the last time we see them do anything as normal as have sex or joke about stale cereal. Setting up an fight for survival beyond anything we've see so far, The Calm Before hit just the right notes to really get me excited for the survivors coming days. show less

A bit of a soap opera feel (I agree with Suzemo). A nice break from the Woodbury violence but also somewhat trite. I honestly enjoy the show more (I know, I know. I am a blasphemer).
For myself, I found Carol's suicide was the single hard-hitting moment in this volume. Her feelings of being judged resonated - the almost high-schoolish mentality of so many of the survivors is difficult to read.

Lori ponders her history with Shane and its possible impact on her family, the group goes to find the National Guard Station where Woodbury gets its weapons, and Judith is born and Carl ruminates on normal life, whatever that is. Apart from the arms-run and Dale's event, most of this installment deals with the characters' various relationships and their thoughts and feeling about the new life. New families have formed because of changing circumstances and everyone is trying to adjust as soon as possible. The only issue with trying to show downtime in this manner is that time skips forward a little haphazardly and a character must tell us that two weeks have gone by rather than us seeing it ourselves. Still, nice to get to see the show more insides of our heroes with their guards down slightly. show less

Preparations, new beginnings, the calm before the storm. I really like the pauses when there is a sense of normalcy. This had some of it, although in moments only. Complacency is explored in many different forms, with their consequences.

This was a nice reprieve from the intense violence of the previous volume. The remaining survivors try to rebuild their life at the prison after the Woodbury ordeal. Most of our cast of characters are able to regain a sense of normalcy within the confines of the prison's fences. Unfortunately, in the land of the walking dead nothing ever lasts.

If you have read this far, you are probably hooked and know that the survivors of the Zombie infestation have taken residence in a local prison (keeping the zombie out) and recently three of their party were kidnapped by the evil forces down the road. This is as much a work about how humans react in adverse situations as it is a zombie graphic novel. The characters are not always likable, but they are what you have--in the same sense that all they have is each other.

This one ends in a teaser for the next series, and since I am not reading the serial version, I have to wait for the next collection to see what happens.