The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – The Walking Dead, Vol. 2: Miles Behind Us by Robert Kirkman

If the first volume of The Walking Dead announces Robert Kirkman’s premise—an America emptied of its certainties—Miles Behind Us is where that premise begins to breed complications. The second collected volume refracts the initial trauma of survival into a series of quieter, nastier moral tests: not just how to stay alive, but what kind of people the survivors will become now that all civic scaffolding has collapsed. Kirkman’s horror is less the shambling corpse than the human consequence of continuity’s loss; this book forces readers to watch community be remade under pressure, and to feel the moral tremors that follow each pragmatic decision.

Formally, the volume is compact and economical. The comic’s black-and-white palette—pared down, almost skeletal—does more than create atmosphere; it disciplines attention. Without the distraction of color, the eye rests on faces and gestures, on the small tells in a hand or the slackening of posture. The result is an intimacy that the text intensifies: conversations that might read as plot scaffolding in another genre instead function here as ethical parables. Small scenes—passing a ration, an argument over whether to trust a stranger, the way food is divided—acquire the weight of ritual because they are the new law in miniature.

Characters function as vectors for moral inquiry. Rick, still raw from his resurrection into apocalypse, is both conscience and cipher: his instincts toward community and civilized procedure anchor the group, but those instincts are continually tested by scarcity and fear. Opposite him stands the slow, corrosive logic of Shane—whose mixture of competence, jealousy, and readiness to do “what must be done” dramatizes one of Kirkman’s central questions: is moral flexibility a survival virtue or the first step toward tyranny? Secondary figures—Dale’s ersatz civic voice, Glenn’s steadiness as a bridge to the outside, Andrea’s uneasy hardening—are not mere archetypes; they are living case studies in how ethical identities ossify or adapt when the future is uncertain.

A striking achievement of Miles Behind Us is its reorientation of the reader’s attention from spectacle to consequence. The series never abandons horror’s visual shocks, but here violence is often offstage or sudden, which forces the narrative into its aftermath. The comics examine aftermaths rather than showdowns: how the group sleeps the night after a raid, how grief recalibrates jokes, how guilt becomes a private force that shapes public choices. This retrospective focus yields a melancholy that feels authentic: apocalypse is less a single dramatic event than a prolonged attrition of hope and habit.

Kirkman’s scripting deserves praise for its tonal control. Dialogue is measured; it often resembles the elliptical, pragmatic talk of people who have learned that too much speech invites danger. Yet an economy of words does not equal a lack of lyricism—moments of rare tenderness (a makeshift funeral, a shared cigarette, an exchanged laugh) shine because they are rare. The narrative oscillates between the banal and the extreme, and in that oscillation the book makes its point: what we took for ordinary life is the very thing that will be fought over and mourned.

Finally, the book stages a study of the social form. Groups form alliances, enact rules, and test punishments; in miniature Kirkman stages sociology without the jargon. The title itself—Miles Behind Us—is a bleak index: distance from the past is not freedom but a landscape of losses. Memory, not geography, becomes the contested terrain. Who remembers the old rules? Who insists on them? And who, in the name of survival, is willing to forget?

In sum, Volume 2 deepens the series’ philosophical stakes. It replaces the raw adrenaline of initial shock with an interrogation of continuity, leadership, and the brittle architectures of trust. For readers seeking a comic that is as much about ethics and community as it is about monsters, Miles Behind Us offers a rigorous, often painful, and always lucid meditation on what it means to be human when everything familiar is gone.