The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – The Walking Dead, Vol. 15: We Find Ourselves by Robert Kirkman

Robert Kirkman’s The Walking Dead has always been, paradoxically, as much about the interior states of the living as about the dead who wander the landscape. In We Find Ourselves that inward turn becomes explicit and insistent: this volume functions less as a succession of shocks than as a close study of how people remake — or fail to remake — themselves after catastrophe. Read as a discrete book, it is an exercise in moral psychology and narrative discipline, one that rewards attention to both what is shown and what is withheld.

At the center of this volume is the question of identity under duress. Characters who have been defined by roles — leader, protector, outsider, foil — are asked to re-evaluate those roles when the old social scaffolding collapses. Kirkman, who often writes with a painful economy, stages scenes where ordinary gestures (pouring coffee, sitting at a table, choosing who to let sleep inside) accrue existential weight. These quotidian moments are not slice-of-life filler; they are the crucible in which new norms are forged. The title itself, We Find Ourselves, gestures toward recovery and discovery, but the volume complicates any simple narrative of progress: identity here is contingent, negotiated, and fragile.

Kirkman’s strength in these pages is his sustained attention to group dynamics. He resists the temptation to flatten the ensemble into archetypes; instead, he allows each character a contradictory interior life. Leadership, in particular, is interrogated not as heroic charisma but as a constant moral ledger — choices that accrue unseen debts. The ethical dilemmas are rarely posed as philosophical puzzles; they are lived, sometimes clumsily, by people who are exhausted, grieving, or simply hungry. This register of ordinary moral labor is what gives the series its emotional force: the horror becomes intelligible precisely because it presses against the familiar.

Formally, the volume is a study in comic-craft that privileges silence and negative space. Charlie Adlard’s art, rendered in stark black-and-white, is less about gore than about framing. Facial close-ups, the long gutters between panels, and the careful modulation of line weight combine to create a rhythm that alternates between claustrophobic intensity and aching stillness. Adlard’s figures often inhabit a world that is simultaneously detailed and stripped down; background clutter is reduced to economical marks, which focuses the reader’s attention on posture, gesture, and expression. In tandem with Kirkman’s scripts — which leave much unsaid, trusting the art to carry nuance — the volume demonstrates how comics can perform interiority as efficiently as a paragraph of prose.

Pacing is another notable feature. Kirkman slows the action to allow scenes of domestic negotiation and psychological fallout to breathe. Sequencing becomes a moral device: the pauses between major events force readers to reckon with aftermath rather than rushing on to the next spectacle. This is not to say the volume lacks tension; rather, the tension is re-channeled from exterior threats (the undead, marauders) into the more delicate menace of mistrust, fatigue, and fractured memory. Such reorientation reframes horror as a social phenomenon, a product of ruptured relationships as much as of external danger.

There is also a subtle but persistent sociopolitical subtext. The survivors’ attempts to rebuild community raise questions about governance, resource allocation, and the ethics of inclusion. How does one balance safety and liberty in a world where both are scarce? Kirkman never offers neat answers; the volume’s value lies instead in forcing the reader to watch nascent institutions being tested in real time. In that sense We Find Ourselves reads as a miniature political drama — intimate in scale, but ideologically weighty.

Finally, the volume’s emotional register is notable for its restraint. Rather than opting for melodrama, Kirkman cultivates a melancholic clarity: grief is allowed to be ordinary, and resilience is shown as incremental. The result is a work that feels humane without being sentimental.

Vol. 15 is a mature chapter in a long-running series: quieter than spectacle-driven volumes, richer for its inward turn. It rewards readers who come to the comic for its human problematic rather than only for its shocks. As both a piece of serialized storytelling and a self-contained meditation on identity, leadership, and communal life after catastrophe, the volume confirms Kirkman’s gift for making apocalypse into a mirror — one in which we can see the fragile architectures of our own moral lives.