The Invincible Walking Dead

How I started reading a comic book double-feature without realizing it--and why I absolutely love the experience.

All of my comics reading this summer has been determined by a trip to a garage sale almost five years ago.

Let me explain.

I went with my wife to a garage sale across town a few years ago and picked up an awesome find—the first four deluxe hardcovers of The Walking Dead. I had read random issues and arcs of the series when it was coming out (my comic shop at the time wasn’t great with pull lists), but I had never actually owned any collected editions. I was thrilled to get all four for about twenty bucks, and took them home and put them on the shelf.

And they sat there for several years.

I had been going through a bit of a dry spell with comic book reading and couldn’t find anything I was really clicking with. That doesn’t have anything to do with the quality of what’s coming out; I just read so quickly and so much that I’m usually out of reading material by the end of the week.

So, on a whim, I decided to pick up the hardcovers I bought at that garage sale and started reading them…and I loved every page. I had forgotten how much I loved the series and realized I had never read the whole book all the way through. But then that made me realize there was another series that I loved, by the same writer, that I also hadn’t read all the way through before.

And that series was—

Sorry, couldn’t help but do the gag.

Having realized I had two awesome series that I had never read from start to finish before, I started picking up the deluxe hardcover editions for both. For the past couple of months, I’ve been reading them by alternating one volume for another. I’d read a hardcover of The Walking Dead, then switch to a volume of Invincible.

That’s mainly because I love The Walking Dead, but I needed a bit of a brain cleanse since it can get so dire and bleak at points. Invincible was a great counterpoint to that.

Right now, I’m on the eleventh hardcover of Invincible and the ninth hardcover of The Walking Dead. I have been taking some breaks with old runs on The New Avengers, The Amazing Spider-Man, and Daredevil, but for the most part, I’ve really liked this double-feature aspect to long-form comics.

I think I’m going to do this experiment again with two more creator-owned series when I’m done. Not necessarily by the same writer or artist, but just two books of very different tones that I can switch back and forth between.

So now that I’m nearly done with Invincible and I’m halfway done with The Walking Dead, what’s going to be my next The Invincible Dead double-feature? What kind of Barbenheimer or Dunesday mash-up will I come up with next?

Do you have any books that you would recommend for a double-feature?

Let me know, and I’ll be happy to add them to the list!

Keep reading,

Kenny