Image Comics

Every week, Image Comics sends a newsletter about our upcoming releases to retailers with a letter at the beginning. This message, by Image Comics PR & Marketing Director Jennifer de Guzman was in the July 10, 2012 newsletter.

This is it. The Big One. Not only is Comic-Con starting on July 11, but what may be comics’ biggest event of the year, the 100th issue of THE WALKING DEAD is going on sale.

I read the monumental issue a few weeks ago and, I have to say, I am still shaken. It is an issue that will change you. You’ll be forced to contemplate the atrocities that human beings commit against each other, something we all know about but do not confront on a daily basis. My life has been affected by recent tragedy — a niece murdered by her ex-boyfriend — and even I don’t think about it every day.

Because it is too dark, too painful, and — almost — too hopeless. Almost because we do feel that pain and revulsion, and as long as we are disturbed by violence, we know that there is some hope for us after all. I almost wish I could see the faces of every person reading THE WALKING DEAD #100 as they come to the realization of humanity’s capacity for atrocity, so I can see our shared humanity. That’s where the hope is.

No writer, no artist, no matter how skilled in the technical aspects of their crafts can affect readers like this unless they have something more, that real insight into what makes us and moves us as a species. From Night of the Living Dead on, zombie stories have made us look into a mirror — made us wonder what we would do, how we would survive, whether we would be corrupted by something different from the infection that is raising the dead. THE WALKING DEAD has taken up this tradition and pushed it to its limits.

And I’m not exaggerating when I say I won’t be the same.

-JdG