The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – The Walking Dead, Vol. 10: What We Become by Robert Kirkman

Robert Kirkman’s The Walking Dead has always been a genre text that pretends to be about zombies while quietly studying the anatomy of people. What We Become, the tenth collected volume, intensifies that quiet investigation: under the constant threat of the undead, Kirkman explores how catastrophe accelerates identity-formation, corrodes institutions, and exposes the brittle scaffolding of morality. This instalment reads less like a conventional action comic and more like a compressed social novel—one in which violence is the engine of history and memory is the currency that characters trade for survival.

At the centre of the volume is transformation—personal, social, and ethical. The title itself registers that becoming is not neutral: it implies loss as much as gain, accretion as much as erosion. Kirkman stages this through close, often brutal scenes of decision-making where choices reverberate beyond the immediate. Rather than depicting survival as a series of tactical wins, the narrative makes clear that survival restructures the self: children learn cruelty, leaders learn calculation, and communities learn to institutionalize paranoia. The moral texture here is neither sanctimonious nor nihilistic; it is forensic. Kirkman wants the reader to trace cause to consequence, to watch how a single compromised act can calcify into a social norm.

The character work is the volume’s strongest asset. Kirkman’s ear for small moments—awkward silences, misremembered jokes, the private rituals people cling to—imbues even the most violent scenes with pathos. You feel the slow hardening of characters who once hoped for a return to the old world. The emotional register is subtle: losses are catalogued in gestures (a child’s stare, a shirt left behind), and those gestures accumulate into elegy. Importantly, the book refuses heroic moralizing. Its protagonists are fallible and sometimes monstrous by necessity; empathy is not a given but an achievement, and that makes the moral dilemmas feel urgent rather than rhetorical.

Artistically, Charlie Adlard’s black-and-white linework complements Kirkman’s themes. Adlard excels at rendering faces and the entropy of environments—ruined homes, improvised fortifications, and the blank, indifferent landscape of decay. The absence of colour focuses attention on contour and shadow, which is apt for a story obsessed with gradations of ethical gray. Panel composition often slows the reader down: small, tightly sequenced panels create claustrophobia; wider, sparse spreads produce the opposite effect, a bleak breath that underscores loneliness and scale. Lettering and pacing work in concert with the visuals to create a cinematic tempo, shifting effortlessly between the intimate and the epic.

The volume also functions as a sociological mirror. Through its micro-histories of camps and conversations, it asks how communities define orthodoxy, how power consolidates in crisis, and how language is repurposed to justify actions that would once have been unthinkable. Kirkman is especially interested in the mechanisms—propaganda, ritual, memory—that enable communities to normalize cruelty. That focus elevates the series above its pulp forebears into something akin to modernist social critique dressed in genre skin.

If the book has a limit, it is structural repetition: across volumes, Kirkman’s cycles of hope, betrayal, and reformation risk becoming predictable. Yet even that repetition is thematically defensible—history repeats in part because human agents repeat patterns. What We Become is less interested in novelty than in the patient excavation of consequence.

In sum, What We Become is a mature, melancholic chapter in Kirkman’s saga: a work that uses apocalypse to ask enduring questions about identity, responsibility, and the social contracts we cobble together when the old ones fail. It’s essential reading for anyone who wants a comic that thinks—grimly, compassionately—about the price of staying human.