The World of The Walking Dead

Matthew Freeman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9781351399296
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

An accessible introduction to the world of The Walking Dead, this book looks across platforms and analytical frameworks to characterize the fictional world of The Walking Dead and how its audiences make use of it.

From comics and television to social media, apps, and mobile games, utilizing concepts derived from literary studies, media studies, history, anthropology, and religious studies, Matthew Freeman examines the functions and affordances of new digital platforms. In doing so, he establishes a new transdisciplinary framework for analyzing imaginary worlds across multiple media platforms, bolstering the critical arena of world-building studies by providing a greater array of vocabulary, concepts, and approaches.

The World of The Walking Dead is an engaging exploration of stories, their platforms, and their reception, ideal for students and scholars of world-building, film and TV studies, new media, and everything in-between.

1 Comics and Television

Historiographical World-building

Early in Fear the Walking Dead’s second season, Travis (Cliff Curtis), Madison (Kim Dickens), and the rest of their family dock on an island to escape the pursuit of an unknown ship. Investigating a house on the shore, the group meets George (David Warshofsky), a self-confessed amateur anthropologist who recognizes Travis’ lineage as Māori. For George, there is an important historic connection between humankind and its land that should not be broken: ‘The commitment to keeping family on the same tribal ground so that every life cycle begins and ends on the same sacred earth . . . that’s beautiful.’ George may be committed to staying on his land during the zombie apocalypse, then, but the series’ central protagonists – much like those of its parent series – have resigned themselves to travelling the world for the sake of survival. Interestingly, in both The Walking Dead and Fear the Walking Dead, it is precisely the removal of tribal ground from a family that enables communities to blend and to thrive, just as characters become almost unrecognizable from their former, civilized selves in order to survive in the new world. Would the once law-abiding Sheriff Rick Grimes, for instance, recognize the single-minded killer he later becomes? The world of The Walking Dead is populated with characters who are stripped of their own histories, and that raises questions about the relationship between the different versions of The Walking Dead and how this world’s portrayal of history shapes this relationship across comics and television.

As stated in the Introduction, the aim of this book is to use the world of The Walking Dead as a means of identifying how a range of different disciplinary concepts and approaches associated with ‘worlds’ in one sense or another, i.e. peoples, societies, cultures, religions, and so on, have been interlaced with digital technologies to shape this storyworld across multiple platforms. But before these digital platforms and technologies are examined later in the book, this first chapter will focus on the ‘core’ texts of the world of The Walking Dead, its ‘motherships,’ as Jenkins (2009) puts it: the primary media works that anchor the storyworld. As was also noted in the Introduction, I am keen to move beyond the literary and media studies-centric question of adaptation between the media of comics and television. Henry Jenkins (2013) has previously studied the perils and possibilities of The Walking Dead as a comics-to-television adaptation, and his analysis echoes common audience-led discourses documented on fan forums indicating that the world of The Walking Dead is comprised of separate universes: a ‘show-verse’ and a ‘comic-verse’ (DragonRacer, 2016).

However, such a distinction is far too simplistic, as would be the assumption that the world of The Walking Dead is about ‘unifying as many of [the] previous stories as possible beneath the arch of some über-tale’ (King, 2004: 685). But it is true that the so-called comic-verse and show-verse are not especially compossible in terms of basic plot and characterization: there have been many characters who have not survived the television series but still exist in the comic book (for example, Carl (Chandler Riggs)), and there are those who died in the comics but have been kept alive in the television series (for example, Carol (Melissa McBride)). Regularly going in new creative directions, the television series has diverged from its comic-based source material in some major ways over the years.

Moving beyond ideas of fidelity and compossibility, however, this chapter takes a historiographical approach to studying these two media. Specifically, I will examine the world-building practices that have been employed in and across The Walking Dead comic book series, The Walking Dead television series, and the companion television series Fear the Walking Dead, exploring how these three series each build the world of The Walking Dead by populating it with what Ryan calls ‘physical laws’ and ‘events.’ Physical laws refer to the principles that determine what kind of events can and cannot happen in a storyworld, such as animals being able to talk in fairy tales or time travel being possible in science fiction (Ryan, 2014: 35). Events, meanwhile, refer to the events that form the focus of the story (Ryan, 2014: 35). But in order to interrogate how these three series presuppose each other in world-building terms, it is crucial to adopt a complex historiographical approach to studying the world of The Walking Dead that draws on a broad range of ideas from an even wider pool of disciplines.

In particular, I will argue that ‘polyglossia’ – a sociological term referring to the co-existence of multiple languages in one society – becomes a useful metaphor for making sense of the world of The Walking Dead, showing how its approach to world-building across the ‘relative’ terrain of comics and television is akin to ‘dialogism,’ a historiographical approach derived from narrative theory. Demonstrating the value of historiography in the study of imaginary worlds will thus take us into debates from fields of history, philosophy, and literary criticism. In doing so, I will show how their problematics are relevant to the study of imaginary worlds, at least in the world of The Walking Dead. These issues need to be taken into account if the sub-field of imaginary world studies is to develop beyond descriptive mappings into a deeper engagement with notions of audience subjectivity.

Conceptualizing a Historiographical Approach to Imaginary Worlds

Unlike subsequent chapters, which will begin by outlining the key theoretical pillars needed to conceptualize transmedia world-building according to the affordances of their platforms, this chapter will instead use its opening section to establish a way of thinking about a comic book series and its television adaptation not as separate fictional universes but rather as two differing media artifacts that sit together much like two differing recollections of the past. This chapter’s focus on the established media of comics and television means that a specific look at the unique affordances of emerging digital technologies and platforms is less needed.

Instead, what is needed here is a clear theorization of how transmedia world-building can be conceptualized as a multi-perspectival process based on historiography and related conceptions from other disciplines based on historical context. This may sound a little vague, so allow me to begin with an example. Long ago, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, the famous German writer and philosopher, once made the fundamental point that a painting exists in space and all of its parts are perceived simultaneously, whereas narrative exists in time and its parts are perceived sequentially. A painting, Lessing said, even if depicting a scene of some kind, is not in itself narrative, but narrative can be brought to it to give it meaning (Ricoeur, 1984). My reasoning for reciting Lessing’s idea is because it hints, albeit indirectly, at the concepts that I will use to interrogate world-building in this chapter. For starters, Lessing helps us to think about historiography and the nature of bringing additional sources to an artifact in order to interpret it; he also therefore hints at the concept of dialogism, which broadly describes how meaning in one source is defined by its relationship to others. Finally, Lessing’s example also hints at philosophical ideas to do with polyglossia and relativism, which both – admittedly in different ways – speak of the multiplicity by which meaning may operate in culture according to a particular set of contexts. All of these ideas are useful for making sense of the world of The Walking Dead, particularly across comics and television.

So, let’s start with the first of these ideas. Put simply, a historiographical approach to analyzing imaginary worlds means, I argue, embracing the plurality of fictional histories – acknowledging that, like history, an imaginary world is comprised of multiple, contradictory perspectives and reports that depend on context. As Gavin Flood (1999: 141) explains: ‘Narratives are always historically located . . . necessarily temporal and constrained by the historical circumstances of their occurrence.’ Indeed, as Greenblatt (1980) has shown in the context of literature, texts need to be read as interrelated to wider historical narratives and other, parallel fields. Soon I will look at how The Walking Dead depicts its own fictional history and draws on historical myths to build its storyworld. But as with the Walking Dead comics compared to their televisual counterparts, moreover, historiography would assume that the placing of various sources alongside each other allows them to ‘interrogate’ each other. In other words, transmedia world-building has much in common with the learning of history. Both the consuming of a transmedia world and the learning of history operates on the basis that people will gain both a richer and fuller understanding of a given story/event if they consume as many documented fragments relating to it as possible: ‘To fully experience any fictional storyworld, consumers must assume the role of hunters and gatherers, chasing down bits of the story across media channels . . . to come away with a richer . . . experience’ (Jenkins, 2006: 21). As such, it is easy to see why a historiographical approach to analyzing transmedia world-building might make sense: if multiple, potentially conflicting histories are embraced, then no one needs to fear that one history will be lost, as will be exemplified via the dialogic relationship between The Walking Dead comic books and television series.

Unlike imaginary worlds, however, the learning of history is anything but agreeable; ‘it is not a collection of facts deemed to be “official” by scholars on high’ (Conway, 2015). Imaginary worlds, by stark contrast – so often ‘transnarrative, transmedial, and transauthorial in nature’ (Wolf, 2012: 68) – are regularly studied and consumed according to how ‘the dispersed pieces of information . . . all fit together to form a meaningful whole’ (Jenkins, 2011). Imaginary worlds often operate amongst issues of canon and continuity, with both media producers and fan cultures policing which material is accepted as officially part of the storyworld (Proctor, 2013). Importantly, as Wolf (2012: 46) states, an attempt to ‘restor[e] consistency can sometimes equal that of actual historical researchers’ establishing facts and revising earlier claims as new data conflicts with them.’ But historical research is not always about consistency, nor even can it be, and imaginary worlds – especially those expanded across sequential narratives, such as superhero comics (Reynolds, 1992; Pustz, 1999), television series (Mittell, 2014; Geraghty, 1981), and those that traverse media borders (Jenkins, 2006; Scolari, 2009; Freeman, 2016) – actively encourage dialogical relationships.

The concept of ‘dialogism,’ theorized by philosopher and literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin (1981), is about discourse and explicitly acknowledges that meaning in one source is defined by its relationship to other instances – both past, to which it responds, and future, whose response it anticipates – thus connecting it to the historiographic approach that is really the core theme of this chapter. Dialogism is the opposite of ‘monologism,’ itself the refusal of discourse to acknowledge its relational constitution and its misrecognition of itself as independent. How, then, might a dialogic approach to The Walking Dead reveal more nuanced ways of discussing its comics and television iterations in world-building terms?

Crucially, Bakhtin’s dialogical concept is always embedded within history and context. ‘For Bakhtin, the understanding between the “self” and “other” is through historicized, communicative encounter which above all else means through language’ (Flood: 1999: 163). Similarly, this chapter will argue against categorizing the so-called comic-verse and the show-verse of The Walking Dead as entirely distinct or parallel worlds. Rather, I will argue that these two ‘media-verses’ exist in a far more complex dialogical relationship that requires ideas and approaches drawn from a range of disciplinary perspectives in order to fully understand it. As we will see, in the case of the world of The Walking Dead, at least, the comic book series is acutely historic in terms of its relationship with the television series and how it is discursively positioned culturally, with audiences acting much like historiographers insofar as they may choose to piece together their own interpretations of the world’s history.

And this idea is really one of ‘relativism,’ i.e. of making sense of the storyworld in terms of an individual’s own personal, social, cultural, technological, and historical context. Relativism, specifically ‘truth relativism,’ is the doctrine that there are no absolute truths, i.e. that truth is always relative to some particular frame of reference, such as a language or a culture (Baghramian and Carter, 2015). Of central importance to this doctrine is the idea that ‘narrative as text pervading culture need not be coherent but can be fragmentary, and the fragmentary nature of texts can serve in turn to create new narratives’ (Flood, 1999: 121). In other words, relativism speaks of the multiplicity of narratives that exist in our own lives every day; to most of us, it does not matter how well these narratives ‘fit together,’ only that we acknowledge their relationship and move forward with our way of seeing that narrative.

Here, we might wish to turn to the Aristotelian narrative distinction between ‘the life that is lived’ and ‘the story that is told.’ As Flood (1999: 136) describes it, ‘the internalized narratives – the “narrative voices” – which comprise our life provide a sense of identity that constitutes us and is constantly reinterpreted within the contexts of culture.’ Such a theory would posit that human beings cannot be the authors, though we can become ‘the narrator and the hero of our own story’ (Ricoeur, 1984: 32). In other words, media audiences may not be able to be the authors of the world of The Walking Dead per se, but they can narrate which version of the world of The Walking Dead they choose to believe in. Later I will show how – via audiences surveyed for the purposes of this chapter – the world of The Walking Dead is not consumed as any kind of absolute but is rather a reflection of an audience’s preferences for particular sets of platforms and their own broader media habits and daily routines.

So, let’s now explore these ideas further in relation to some examples and how these concepts inform specific opportunities to populate the world of The Walking Dead with physical laws and events. First I will lay out the importance of thinking about the world of The Walking Dead as akin to history, before then interrogating the above historiographical ideas, suggesting that an understanding of the relationship between the comic book series and the television series in world-building terms is best characterized through an ‘historicized, communicative encounter which above all else means through language’ (Flood: 1999: 163).

World as History

The Walking Dead comic books, created by Robert Kirkman and illustrated by Charlie Adlard, are still being produced today. The television series is further behind in the timeline. When it comes to the world depi...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Beyond Literary and Media World-building
• 1 Comics and Television: Historiographical World-building
• 2 Augmented Television: Sociological World-building
• 3 Social Media: Religious World-building
• 4 Mobile Games: Philosophical World-building
• Conclusion: Towards a Transdisciplinary World-building Framework
• Index