As Rick, Glen and Michone go out of the prison to investigate a helicopter crash, they come upon another community, run by a savage man who calls himself "The Governor". By the time they realize how dangerous he is not only to them, but to the people left in the prison, it may already be too late.
The Best Defense is the long awaited jolt of actual story-line that the series was in such a desperate need of. A new threat is introduced, and while nothing much happens in this volume (you died of shock yet?), it promises a lot of changes in the survivors' status quo.
Unfortunately, the story is headed into a place I don't like. Half of Volume 5 is dedicated to blood, mutilation and torture, and it is no fun. I didn't sign up for this to go through torture-porn fest. And even though I realize it is Kirkman's right to take any course he wants, I'm just not ok with the fact that he has chosen the easiest - that of Mad Max and cheap revulsion-inducing brutality. Just like his ham-handed attempts at character building, his depiction of the evil face of surviving humanity is schematic and formulaic at best. I think the only thing his bad guy didn't manage to do in this one single volume, was eat a baby while raping it to death at the same time.
The Walking Dead has been a stable 6-7/10 ever since it started. I liked the author's premise, I also liked the execution of the beginning. But ever since then the series is a middling affair of overly pretentious boredom, and this new turn of events promises to be a middling affair of pretentious violence. After all the hype for the series, I really hoped it would get better. Instead, it's just doing different kinds of mediocre. Well, I'll keep reading it for now, but it's becoming less and less something I enjoy, and more and more a chore I do for this blog's sake...
6.5/10
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