The Walking Bread 1

With a title like The Walking Bread, you suspect that you’re not in for an intellectually stimulating read. Yes, it’s a return to the world of lame comic parodies of other comics, in this case, if you hadn’t guessed, The Walking Dead.

Sometimes these things can surprise you. Cerebus started off as a Conan parody. Groo remained a Conan parody. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles was and is a lucrative parody. The Walking Bread more or less meets expectations, or lack of them.

There’s not much of a storyline. After a bread factory is taken over by a heinous multinational corporation, accidently created zombified bread leaps off the production lines and starts eating its way though the human population. It’s up to Joe the Janitor and his sidekick Sue to save the day. It’s a patently ludicrous set up, and it could have capitalised on this. Instead, it relies on a series of corny jokes and rather predictable fight sequences that lead to an equally unsurprising conclusion.

The characterisation’s nominal, the dialogue’s flat. In its favour it’s comprehensible, which is more that can be said for many mainstream comics out there.

Equally problematic is the artwork. It’s mostly fine when the characters are in rather stiff poses, or faces are in close up, but it falls apart entirely when it has to deal with anything approaching dynamism or with perspective. There are a couple of times where it’s entirely unclear what’s going on. That panel there – has the big bad boss stood on a broom? Has it been thrown at him? Something else altogether? Other scenes do have clarity but lack the technical skills to make them convincing. Kimble appears completely incapable of communicating propulsion, for example, apart from pencilling in a couple of motion lines to tell us the direction in which objects are moving.

This isn’t entirely devoid of the suggestion that its creators possess talent, but it’s only demonstrated in small amounts. What this most reminded me of was a fanzine, the sort that you used to see produced by enthusiastic but not hugely talented comics fans a decade or two back. You were more inclined to forgive their faults because you understood that it was an amateur publication, and that it was the first step towards more technically proficient work. These days, the technology exists for people to make their debut on the professional stage, and you suspect that it’ll lead to quite a bit of humiliation for comics creators as they look back on those first publications in later years. So it is here.

(And look – I made it the end without making a banal jibe about it being half-baked! Ah shit, too late…)