Ed Mann Walking

I don’t check weather reports. Kristen always does. The night before, the morning of, whatever the case may be – she always tries to be prepared. So quite often I leave the apartment, take a few steps, and immediately turn around because it’s much colder or hotter than I anticipated. Such is my life.

If I had taken a look at the forecast for today, I may not have been so surprised by the storm this morning. I fed the cats, sat down to do some work, and the next thing I know they’re both spazzing out… way more than they usually do. I actually had to intervene and break up the fight they were having. And as soon as that was over, the female jumped up onto a table and started staring out the window. It wasn’t like she was just casually observing like she typically does – it looked like she was waiting for something.

I’ve heard things like cats can sense the electricity in the air, so they know when storms are coming – and I’ll be damned if ten minutes later I didn’t look around and notice it looked like night time outside. I got up, started making my way to the front windows, and could see the trees outside swinging back and forth wildly. A few seconds later the downpour started. No warning. No build up. Just a full on storm. People ran for cover, thunder set off car alarms, the power flickered off and on, and while I surveyed the devastation – the cat just turned to me with a look on her face that seemed to say “I told you…”

And she did. And that’s weird.

Truth is, I love storms. So even though I start picturing things like trees coming through our windows or lightning striking our building, it was still an enjoyable start to my day. If only I’d had a cup of coffee to go with it. Unfortunately, I don’t really drink it anymore. But that’s another entry for another day.

And so the EMW gang suffers its first casualty. We knew from day one that this is what the entire prelude portion of the story would build to. I’ll be honest, I’ve grown pretty tired of zombie stories that concern themselves with the initial outbreak – because that’s what 99% of them do. We were never particularly interested in going that route. We didn’t even start that way just to set up Ed’s character, because it kicks in well after the zombies first appear and it sort of keeps moving without much time for everyone to stop and explain their life stories.

I think we’ve done an okay job at establishing who these people are, but I’d be the first to admit that character development has not been at the forefront with this section of the tale. In fact, we’ll learn more about Ed in the first few pages of the next chapter than we have in the past year.

The single most important reason we started the story where we did is that what happens in this particular strip becomes incredibly significant for Ed. It’s something that’s going to stay with him for a long, long time and an event that will be referenced frequently as we move forward.

I think our interest in this arc has started to wane these last few weeks and I apologize for that. I’ve been so busy making sure that we’re ready to transition into the next phase of this comic that sometimes it’s not that exciting to come back and revisit events that I’ve already moved on from in some ways.

But there are a few interesting moments coming up in the next few strips before we officially end the prelude and get started on the narrative that Kristen and I originally talked about over a year ago.

Not that post-apocalyptic stories aren’t just as overdone as all the zombie stuff, but they are a different beast in many ways.  I think the last sixteen months have been an extremely valuable boot camp period and now we’re ready to jump in and begin setting up a much more elaborate universe.