Preparation for WAR.

A supply run outside the prison leads to a run-in with the Governor’s men. This deluxe presentation in STUNNING FULL COLOR also features another installment of Cutting Room Floor and creator commentary.

An accessible introduction to the world of The Walking Dead, this book looks across platforms and analytical frameworks to characterize the fictional world of The Walking Dead and how its audiences make use of it. From comics and television to social media, apps, and mobile games, utilizing concepts derived from literary studies, media studies, history, anthropology, and religious studies, Matthew Freeman examines the functions and affordances of new digital platforms. In doing so, he establishes a new transdisciplinary framework for analyzing imaginary worlds across multiple media platforms, bolstering the critical arena of world-building studies by providing a greater array of vocabulary, concepts, and approaches. The World of The Walking Dead is an engaging exploration of stories, their platforms, and their reception, ideal for students and scholars of world-building, film and TV studies, new media, and everything in-between.

From the beginning, both Robert Kirkman's comics and AMC's series of The Walking Dead have brought controversy in their presentations of race, gender and sexuality. Critics and fans have contended that the show's identity politics have veered toward the decidedly conservative, offering up traditional understandings of masculinity, femininity, heterosexuality, racial hierarchy and white supremacy. This collection of new essays explores the complicated nature of relationships among the story's survivors. In the end, characters demonstrate often-surprising shifts that consistently comment on identity politics. Whether agreeing or disagreeing with critics, these essays offer a rich view of how gender, race, class and sexuality intersect in complex new ways in the TV series and comics.

THIEF OF THIEVES returns to kick off its final job! Conrad Paulson is deadÑor is he? And what does a notorious Russian prison have to do with the master thief known as Redmond?

In 2010, The Walking Dead premiered on AMC and has since become the most watched scripted program in the history of basic cable. Based on the graphic novel series by Robert Kirkman, The Walking Dead provides a stark, metaphoric preview of what the end of civilization might look like: the collapse of infrastructure and central government, savage tribal anarchy, and purposeless hordes of the wandering wounded. While the representation of zombies has been a staple of the horror genre for more than half a century, the unprecedented popularity of The Walking Dead reflects an increased identification with uncertain times. In The Walking Dead Live! Essays on the Television Show, Philip L. Simpson and Marcus Mallard have compiled essays that examine the show as a cultural text. Contributors to this volume consider how the show engages with our own social practices—from theology and leadership to gender, race, and politics—as well as how the show reflects matters of masculinity, memory, and survivor’s guilt. As a product of anxious times, The Walking Dead gives the audience an idea of what the future may hold and what popular interest in the zombie genre means. Providing insight into the broader significance of the zombie apocalypse story, The Walking Dead Live! will be of interest to scholars of sociology, cultural history, and television, as well as to fans of the show.

More classic tales from the original Warren era Vampirella series! Horrors from the grave trap Vampi in an ancient Roman crypt!

At a time when print and film have shown the classic Western and noir genres to be racist, heteronormative, and neocolonial, Sara Humphreys’s Manifest Destiny 2.0 asks why these genres endure so prolifically in the video game market. While video games provide a radically new and exciting medium for storytelling, most game narratives do not offer fresh ways of understanding the world. Video games with complex storylines are based on enduring American literary genres that disseminate problematic ideologies, quelling cultural anxieties over economic, racial, and gender inequality through the institutional acceptance and performance of Anglo cultural, racial, and economic superiority. Although game critics and scholars recognize how genres structure games and gameplay, the concept of genre continues to be viewed as a largely invisible power, subordinate to the computational processes of programming, graphics, and the making of a multimillion-dollar best seller. Investigating the social and cultural implications of the Western and noir genres in video games through two case studies—the best-selling games Red Dead Redemption (2010) and L.A. Noire (2011)—Humphreys demonstrates how the frontier myth continues to circulate exceptionalist versions of the United States. Video games spread the neoliberal and neocolonial ideologies of the genres even as they create a new form of performative literacy that intensifies the genres well beyond their originating historical contexts. Manifest Destiny 2.0 joins the growing body of scholarship dedicated to the historical, theoretical, critical, and cultural analysis of video games.

Funerary rituals and the cult of the dead are classics of research in religious studies, especially for ancient Egypt. Still, we know relatively little about how people interacted in daily life at the city of Memphis and its Saqqara necropolis in the late second millennium BCE. By focussing on lived ancient religion, we can see that the social and religious strategies employed by the individuals at Saqqara are not just means on the way to religious, post-mortem salvation, nor is their self-representation simply intended to manifest social status. On the contrary, the religious practices at Saqqara show in their complex spatiality a wide spectrum of options to configure sociality before and after one's own death. The analytical distinction between religion and other forms of human practices and sociality illuminates the range of cultural practices and how people selected, modified, or even avoided certain religious practices. As a result, pre-funerary, funerary and practices of the subsequent mortuary cults, in close connection with religious practices directed towards other ancestors and deities, allow the formation of imagined and functioning reminiscence clusters as central social groups at Saqqara, creating a heuristic model applicable also to other contexts.