The Walking Dead Compendium Vol. 3; Robert Kirkman

This is going to be a short review mainly because you can’t talk about the 3rd Compendium without spoilers for the other 2 volumes, and just for specific parts of this third massive installment of “The Walking Dead” in general. I mean, the book is over a thousand pages long! I can’t talk about the stuff I liked toward the end without massively ruining earlier story lines! So I’ll try to be as vague as possible when it comes to the story, and the things I thought did, and did not, work this time around.

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The writing has significantly improved from the first two compendiums and, if you do/did watch TWD series on TV, you’ll note that this Vol. 3’s Negan and the AMC Negan are pretty much spot on, so kudos there (this was the season I actually taped out of watching the show). It’ll be interesting to see, moving forward, how the leadership between these different groups grows and evolves. And while I liked the story telling a bit more, Carl still bothers me and, maybe I missed it, but there comes a part in the book where a significant amount of time passes and I was confused as to just how much time went by. It’s not a huge deal all things considered, but it did make me stop a lot trying to match up timelines etc. which paused my reading flow. Plus, when you read the monthly issues it’s easy to pass off the repetitive story structure, but in the giant compendium it’s much easier to see that this story follows the exact same plot points as the previous volumes—Rick and crew get some peace, progress their communities forward, get a little confident in leading abilities, then meet a violent group (always more violent than the last) that go on a rampage with Rick’s group and destroy that peace and force the main group to violently protect the community. Rinse, repeat (which happened twice in this compendium alone, lol). This is why it gets another 4 stars from me, but I am curious to see how it all ends in the 4th compendium!