For those of us who love comics, October 31^st 2010 is a day of significance, or dare I say historic importance. Besides being Halloween, a holiday that brings out the child in many of us, it is the day that one of the best comic books of all time gets beamed into our living rooms in the form of an adapted TV series. The Walking Dead, an Eisner award-winning zombie horror comic series, premieres on AMC, and if the network’s success with Mad Men, Breaking Bad, and Rubicon is any indication, this could be a hell of a ride.
 

Over the past decade, we’ve seen many of our favorite comic book characters on the silver screen. But the process of going from the page to the movies is a process that invariably involves plucking ideas from a compendium of comic books to draft a screenplay that in the end is…well let’s just say “different” than the source material.

But true comic book aficionados would agree that the episodic nature of comic books makes them perfectly suited to the small screen. The natural forces that keep comic book fans coming back each month to grab their favorite titles are somehow similar to those that cause millions of people across the world to regularly park themselves on their couches every week to catch new episodes of their favorite TV shows.

To be sure, there have been TV shows over the years that appeal to fans of comic books. Some, such as the old Hulk, Spider-Man and Wonder Woman shows of my youth, simply took a character out of a comic book and gave them their own live action TV show. The classic Adam West Batman TV series is always described as “campy”, which it was, but what is lost in that description is that the show’s depiction of the Batman character had very little to do with the character we find in the comics. More recently, many TV hits such as Lost or Heroes did a fantastic job of capturing the edge-of-your-seat cliffhanger vibe that comes through in many of today’s comic books. But take a look at the list of comic books that have been adapted to live action TV, and the list is both short and underwhelming.

Early indications are that AMC’s treatment of The Walking Dead will be different. We’re expecting a fairly faithful adaptation of the series, and fans are eager to see a great comic book get the royal treatment by AMC TV. AMC uses the tagline “Story Matters Here”, and they’ve got a great one with The Walking Dead.

To honor the event, Fantom Comics and Subculture for the Cultured are proud to bring you two weekly columns in response to each new episode of The Walking Dead. Check out each of the following for an introduction on what to expect from each of our authors, and be sure to subscribe to whichever column interests you so you can get the inside scoop on The Walking Dead as it unfolds: