4.5 stars-still a really great series. I wonder how long I'll have to wait for more. ( )

Now the ‘roamers’ gather into huge groups called ‘herds’! Gee whiz! The living in this volume seem to be much more dangerous than the dead! What's that say about human nature? And another group, The Saviors, seem to be the latest human gang to deal with at book's end! Still, and all, Rick ends this volume positively, saying, "We can finally stop surviving, and start living." I hope so, for their sake!

Thanks to Carmel for giving me this volume! A great book friend to have! I'm a lucky reader! Thank you! ( )

I'm a fool for ever doubting this series. {more} ( )

Good. It is good. Now, I need to decide how far I pursue this story.

When I first heard of The Walking Dead, I was excited about the possibility of a never-ending survival story featuring zombies. Now I'm wondering if there wouldn't be better story telling if there was an end in sight. [b:The Walking Dead Compendium 2|14744381|The Walking Dead, Compendium 2|Robert Kirkman|http://d.gr-assets.com/books/1344152205s/14744381.jpg|20393152], while fulfilling my need for a continued experience with familiar and beloved characters, starts to repeat itself. New place to live, new zombie invasion. New place to live, more humans to deal with. After awhile, I can write the story in my head as I go.

There's a part of me that wonders if this isn't because the story is meant to be a serial in the old-fashioned sense. I'm reading 48 comics at a sitting, and in this case doing it over a weekend. But that's [i]two years[/i] of comics as they originally were released, and there's a part of me that wonders if that isn't why things are starting to sound repetitive. Would all indefinite comics (and I haven't heard to the contrary that WD has no known end date) read like this, in large collections?

The only other lengthy comic collection I've read to compare it to is [b:Y The Last Man|156534|Y The Last Man, Vol. 1 Unmanned|Brian K. Vaughan|http://d.gr-assets.com/books/1349073112s/156534.jpg|151061], but that was a limited run. Even then, the same problems I had with emotional impact being lessoned because of the formate (for me, for me!) were there. But it wasn't repetitive; it had a direction that WD doesn't seem to have in the second compendium. In all honesty, the first compendium may have only seemed to because, after the first few issues, I was reading the source material of a TV show I'd actually followed farther than the book. I had the show as a marker, and the end of the collection corresponded to what was upcoming on television (oddly enough, I finished Comp. 2 on the night of the season three finale).

I don't know. I think I might wait for the next compendium to come out before I return to Rick and his compadres. Kirkman isn't really doing anything that hasn't been done before with zombies, save doing it on a larger (read: longer) scale. It's nice, I like it, and the characters are great. But after a while, a story about rebuilding life after a zombie apocalypse eventually becomes just a story about life, and the ho-hum aspects of life, at that. Still, it beats some of the other crap out there. ( )

Compendium 2 covers issues 49-96 of the comic. This is almost all Alexandia time. Issue #100 of the comic is where Season 6 of the comic ends, leaving this as the events leading up Neegan. Of the story arcs and compendiums, I think the TV show did this era a bit more justice with a number of side stories that weren't in the comics but were even more interesting. Still a page turner that kept me up at night saying "just one more issue". ( )