The Walking Dead 2004 #12 p17 - Rick, Tyreese, Allen, Andrea, Lori

This is one of those pieces which needed a little bit of patience for the right one to come along. I had been looking for a nice example of Adlard's early Walking Dead art for a while. Ideally it had to be something featuring Rick, and it had to be from before #19 where his style started to evolve for the first time towards what we recognise later on in the run.

Each time something came up it either wasn't quite what I was looking for, was priced slightly higher than I wanted to go, or the transaction wasn't going well so I backed out. I also wasn't watching out for art as often as I usually do due to life changing circumstances going on at home. It wasn't going well.

Wind the clock back to 17 years ago and this page was at an SDCC booth waiting for its original buyer. The Walking Dead was still relatively unknown and had just started to really lean into it's main hooks, anyone in this series can die and of course it's the humans that are the real monsters. The buyer recalled that Adlard and Kirkman were staffing their own booth and he bought it direct from Charlie. It was taken home, framed and then never made it to the wall but instead ended up in storage.

So when it was eventually dusted off years later and put up for sale I gave it my best shot, and now it has a home with me.

What caught my eye was that it doesn't suffer from being without dialogue, or out of context of the issue, or even if you didn't know the title. It's simple story telling but done well. A really nice piece of cartooning! Exactly the type of moment you would expect to encounter in a zombie apocalypse.