It's hard to say exactly what reignited this pop cultural fascination with zombies that we've been experiencing for the last several years. Like Superheroes, zombies have been yanked from the pages of pulp and thrust into the mainstream to the extent that even parodies such as "Shaun of the Dead" and "Zombieland" can strike a chord with people who wouldn't be caught dead sticking their nose in an issue of Weird Tales, but I submit to you that the best modern zombie tales are still found in the funny pages.

Walking Dead, by Robert Kirkman and Charlie Adlard, is an unabashedly classicist yarn (sorry, no zombie tri-atheletes) that skews more toward survival horror than it does zombie gore, though believe me, there is plenty of gore. The series picks up where most classic zombie stories leave off, after the better part of the world has been overrun with the undead, leaving very few survivors fighting to preserve their humanity. Though Walking Dead has topped independent sales charts since its inception, it is certainly not for the faint of heart, or stomach for that matter, painting vivid portraits or normal people who do heroic to downright sadistic things in order to survive. All the same, I consistently recommend this book to fans of the genre and otherwise with a 100 percent success rate so far. With Walking Dead, Robert Kirkman proves once again that masterful execution of the simplest ideas are often the most enduring and memorable.

In other Walking Dead news, Frank Darabont ("Shawshank Redemption"/"The Green Mile") and AMC ("Mad Men"/"Breaking Bad") greenlit a television pilot of the survival epic last month. Cross your fingers for that, but rush to the comic shop to pick up issue No. 69 on the shelves right now by Image Comics.

-- Elias Pate, Contributor, Big Shiny Robot, bigshinyrobot.com