The Walking Dead, Volume 8: Made to Suffer by Robert Kirkman, Charlies Adlard, and Cliff Rathburn (2010)

The promise of rough chuckles for Volume 8 after the calm of Volume 7 was no joke: in The Walking Dead, Volume 8: Made to Suffer by Robert Kirkman, Charlies Adlard, and Cliff Rathburn (2010) things get pretty real pretty fast. The Governor, the most uncomplicatedly evil creation in the entire book, has set his eyes (well, eye) on our heroes who are trying to build a community behind the safety of their prison walls. That community is blasted apart quickly, although the group is much more of a match for The Governor and his crew of duped townlings than they expected. Heroes die. Attackers die. A bunch of zombies die. In fact, only a handful of our named characters appear to survive to walk the pages of Volume 9. I get the feeling that Kirkman had played out the prison scenario and needed to inject some excitement into his narrative, so he went all Game of Thrones, killed off some unexpectedly major characters, and waited to see what would happen next. And it got my attention, I'm definitely ready to follow him into the next volume.