He has gone too far.

With Rick and company out beyond the walls, Glenn finds himself alone in Alexandria with very few alliesÉ

EVERYTHING IS DIFFERENT NOW! There's someone new in the Invincible costume, but why - and for how long? Answers to all these questions and more in this monumental status-quo-altering issue!

In Imperiled Whiteness, Penelope Ingram examines the role played by media in the resurgence of white nationalism and neo-Nazi movements in the Obama-to-Trump era. As politicians on the right stoked anxieties about whites “losing ground” and “being left behind,” media platforms turned whiteness into a commodity that was packaged and disseminated to a white populace. Reading popular film and television franchises (Planet of the Apes, Star Trek, and The Walking Dead) through political flashpoints, such as debates over immigration reform, gun control, and Black Lives Matter protests, Ingram reveals how media cultivated feelings of white vulnerability and loss among white consumers. By exploring the convergence of entertainment, news, and social media in a digital networked environment, Ingram demonstrates how media’s renewed attention to “imperiled whiteness” enabled and sanctioned the return of overt white supremacy exhibited by alt-right groups in the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville in 2017 and the Capitol riots in 2021.

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.

Tales of hauntings, and creature sightings from the state of Utah.

A study of the natural world as imagined by contemporary writers, specifically their portrayals of nature as monster In Zombiescapes and Phantom Zones: Ecocriticism and the Liminal from “Invisible Man” to “The Walking Dead,” Lee Rozelle chronicles the weirdest, ugliest, and most mixed-up characters to appear on the literary scene since World War II—creatures intimately linked to damaged habitats that rise from the muck, not to destroy or rule the world, but to save it. The book asks what happens to these landscapes after the madness, havoc, and destruction. What monsters and magic surface then? Rozelle argues that zombiescapes and phantom zones depicted in the book become catalysts for environmental reanimation and sources of hope. Liminality offers exciting and useful new ways to conceptualize places that have historically proven troublesome, unwieldy, or hard to define. Zombiescapes can reduce the effects of pollution, promote environmental justice, lessen economic disparity, and localize food production. The grotesques that ooze and crawl from these passages challenge readers to consider new ways to re-inhabit broken lands at a time when energy efficiency, fracking, climate change, the Pacific trade agreement, local food production, and sustainability shape the intellectual landscape. Rozelle focuses on literary works from 1950 to 2015—the zombiescapes and monsterscapes of post–World War II literature—that portray in troubling and often devastating ways the “brownfields” that have been divested of much of their biodiversity and ecological viability. However, he also highlights how these literary works suggest a new life and new potential for such environments. With an unlikely focus on places of ruination and an application of interdisciplinary, transnational approaches to a range of fields and texts, Rozelle advances the notion that places of distortion might become a nexus where revelation and advocacy are possible again. Zombiescapes and Phantom Zones has much to offer to various fields of scholarship, including literary studies, ecocriticism, and environmental studies. Research, academic, and undergraduate audiences will be captivated by Rozelle’s lively prose and unique anthropological, ecocritical, and literary analyses.

In 1968, George Romero's film Night of the Living Dead premiered, launching a growing preoccupation with zombies within mass and literary fiction, film, television, and video games. Romero's creativity and enduring influence make him a worthy object of inquiry in his own right, and his long career helps us take stock of the shifting interest in zombies since the 1960s. Examining his work promotes a better understanding of the current state of the zombie and where it is going amidst the political and social turmoil of the twenty-first century. These new essays document, interpret, and explain the meaning of the still-budding Romero legacy, drawing cross-disciplinary perspectives from such fields as literature, political science, philosophy, and comparative film studies. Essays consider some of the sources of Romero's inspiration (including comics, science fiction, and Westerns), chart his influence as a storyteller and a social critic, and consider the legacy he leaves for viewers, artists, and those studying the living dead.

Is heroism possible for everyone? Should it be? What kinds of stories do we tell when we talk about heroes and what do these stories reveal about how we view ourselves? This book takes up these questions and more by reflecting on twenty-first century American television shows. Among the shows examined are Only Murders in the Building, Game of Thrones, The Good Lord Bird, The Boys, and Severance. What we find is an entertainment landscape unsure about what a hero is or even what qualifies as heroic. In a nation uncertain about heroism, we see a dramatic rise in the popularity of the anti-hero and even in worlds without heroes. This fragmented variety highlights how the American political mind is similarly fragmented in what it believes are its highest aspirations—and its deepest anxieties. It is this fragmentation that may help us understand why twenty-first century entertainment has elevated the heroic to the supernatural while simultaneously democratizing heroism to the point where anyone may become one. A Hero in All of Us?: Heroism and American Political Thought as Seen on TV explores this multifaceted landscape to better understand how Americans view their heroes and themselves.

It makes us jump. It makes us scream. It haunts our nightmares. So why do we watch horror? Why do we play it? What could possibly appealing about a genre that tries to terrify us? Why would we subject ourselves to shriek-inducing shocks, or spend dozens of hours watching a television show about grotesque flesh-eating monsters? Monstrous Forms offers a theory of horror that works through the genre across a broad range of contemporary moving-image media: film, television, video games, YouTube, gifs, streaming, virtual reality. This book analyzes our experience of and engagement with horror by focusing on its form, paying special attention to the common ground, the styles and forms that move between mediums. It looks at the ways that moving-image horror addresses its audiences, the ways that it elicits, or demands, responses from its viewers, players, browsers. Camera movement (or "camera" movement), jump scares, offscreen monsters-horror innovates and perfects styles that directly provoke and stimulate the bodies in front of the screen. Analyzing films including Paranormal Activity, It Follows, and Get Out, video games including Amnesia: The Dark Descent, Layers of Fear, and Until Dawn, and TV shows including The Walking Dead and American Horror Story, Monstrous Forms argues for understanding horror through its sensational address, and dissects the forms that make that address so effective.