The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – The Walking Dead, Vol. 6: This Sorrowful Life by Robert Kirkman

Robert Kirkman’s sixth collected volume of The Walking Dead is where the series’ moral inquiry hardens into spectacle. Collected issues #31–36, This Sorrowful Life stages a collision between two very different social experiments — the fragile, democratic prison community and the performative “safety” of Woodbury under the Governor — and uses that collision to interrogate what survival actually demands of the living. 

At the narrative level the volume functions like a short, sharp elegy. The title — This Sorrowful Life — is not merely a flourish but a key: Kirkman is asking his readers to inhabit grief as a continuing condition, not a discrete event. The action is propelled by escape and return: Rick, Glenn, Michonne and others attempt to flee Woodbury’s gilded cage; their flight and the eventual discovery awaiting them at the prison force characters and readers alike to reckon with ethical residue left by the apocalypse. The stakes are sensational, but Kirkman keeps them tethered to personal consequences rather than spectacle alone. 

The moral axis of the book is most sharply focused through Michonne’s arc and the figure of the Governor. Woodbury is presented less as a simple den of villainy and more as a political theatre where safety is traded for obedience — a useful mirror to the prison’s own emergent hierarchy. Michonne’s quest for revenge is both cathartic and troubling: it satisfies a narrative desire for retribution while exposing the corrosion revenge inflicts on anyone who embraces it. These scenes are the book’s moral fulcrum; they ask whether justice in a lawless world inevitably becomes the same kind of violence it condemns. 

Visually, Charlie Adlard’s black-and-white rendering does much of the work Kirkman’s script invites. Adlard compresses panic, intimate violence, and quiet devastation into stark frames — faces become topographies of loss, and the negative space in panels amplifies silences that the text cannot bear alone. Adlard’s economy of line and the book’s monochrome palette turn the familiar tropes of the zombie genre (chase, gore, siege) into a study of exhaustion: motion that looks frantic on the page reads as inevitable in the imagination. The art and lettering collaborate to produce tonal shifts — from claustrophobic close-ups to long, elegiac scenes of aftermath — that reinforce the book’s mournful register. 

Thematically, the volume advances Kirkman’s longer project: exploring governance, community formation, and the costs of security. Woodbury and the prison are not just locations but political thought experiments. Which arrangements preserve something like humanity? Which arrangements merely postpone the ethical choices that living together requires? Kirkman refuses easy answers; instead, he lays out consequences and asks readers to sit with them. That refusal is the book’s intellectual backbone. 

If one were to press for critique, it would be that Kirkman’s sympathy is sometimes uneven: secondary characters can function more as moral signposts than fully realized subjects, and the urgency of action occasionally trumps quieter psychological interiority. Yet this is also a volume about decision-making under duress, and the briskness of plot underscores the plausibility that, in extremis, nuance is sacrificed for survival. On balance, the sacrifices in interior detail are compensated for by the volume’s sustained interrogation of leadership, loyalty, and loss. 

This Sorrowful Life is a pivotal, somber instalment that reframes the series’ violence as ethical inquiry. It rewards readers who come to graphic storytelling not merely for thrills but for moral complexity: a volume that is as interested in the governance of a fallen world as it is in the wounds such governance inflicts. For readers of the series it is indispensable; for newcomers it offers a compact example of how the medium can sustain serious philosophical and political reflection without surrendering narrative momentum.

Recommended for readers interested in character-driven apocalyptic fiction, political readings of genre comics, and anyone who appreciates how visual austerity can deepen thematic impact.