The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – The Walking Dead, Vol. 9: Here We Remain by Robert Kirkman

Here We Remain reads like a compact elegy for a world that has already learned how to bury its dead. Collected from issues #49–54, this volume sits at an inflection point in Robert Kirkman’s long-running serial: the shock of large-scale loss has passed its apex, and what remains is the slow, hard business of surviving together — and discovering what “together” now means.

Formally, the volume is an exercise in tonal restraint. Kirkman pares the narrative down to two intertwined projects: a close study of the father–son bond (Rick and Carl) under extreme pressure, and a set of domestic reconnections as splintered survivors tentatively reknit community ties. The plot — the aftermath of the prison assault, long walks between ruined houses, brief reunions and fragile sheltering — gives Kirkman the space to explore grief not as spectacle but as a quotidian labor. The novelistic rhythms of conversation, silence, and small domestic chores carry more weight here than any single set-piece.

Visually, the book’s black-and-white austerity serves the text’s moral focus. Charlie Adlard and Cliff Rathburn’s line work rejects the luridness of genre horror in favour of textures: a mud-streaked jacket, a child’s tentative gesture, the off-kilter shadow that lingers at a doorway. These choices foreground the human scale of the story; the monsters — both dead and living — are most terrifying when allowed to remain on the page as suggestions rather than constant spectacle. The economy of the art amplifies Kirkman’s most important gambit: that the apocalypse is not only a collapse of institutions, but a rearrangement of everyday meaning. 

Thematically, Here We Remain asks what social life looks like when safety is precarious and memory itself is a site of trauma. The volume is particularly attentive to the ways survivors domesticate loss: by naming routines, guarding small privacies, and — crucially — telling stories. In those quiet exchanges Kirkman stages his most radical ethical question: is there a form of life worth preserving that does not replicate the hierarchies and violences of the old world? The answer here is provisional and uneven, which is precisely the book’s strength; Kirkman refuses tidy redemption in favour of moral deliberation performed between imperfect people. 

Close reading also reveals the series’ continuing interest in bodily vulnerability as a mode of narrative pressure. When Rick is injured and Carl must shoulder responsibilities beyond his years, the comics turn parenting into a moral laboratory: choices are shaped by scarcity, fear, and love all at once. That mixture complicates any simple heroic reading of leadership or survivalism; Kirkman is uninterested in mythic figures and far more invested in the staggering smallness of decision-making under duress. 

If the volume has limitations, they are structural. The serialized origin of the material sometimes yields abrupt tonal shifts and a cadence of cliffhanging subplots that can jar against the otherwise meditative center of the book. But those are, in a sense, the book’s honest formal debts to its publication model — the serial’s appetite for momentum and the collected edition’s appetite for coherence are different. Kirkman manages the tension by letting character interiority be the stabilizing force, and this often succeeds.

Here We Remain may not be the most violent or sensational chapter in The Walking Dead series, but as a concentrated study in aftermath it is one of the more humane and philosophically interesting volumes. It trades spectacle for sustained moral attention: how to grieve, how to keep another person alive, how to make a home when the world offers nothing in the way of guarantees. For readers interested in graphic storytelling that treats apocalypse as an ethical problem rather than merely a genre premise, this volume is quietly indispensable. 

Recommendation: Read this volume slowly — let its silences register. The book asks you to live in the paused spaces between action, and that is where its deepest intelligence shows itself.