(Not including the graphic rape bc obviously)

Personally I can’t imagine show carol asking Rick and Lori for a threesome 💀💀

I'm watching twd for the first like all the way through time (I've watched up to s4 in the past and I've seen a few different s7 eps) and the back of my brain keeps thinking comic stuff is gonna happen 😭 specifically with Rick and Andrea. like I'm not stupid I know im wrong but the back of my head impulsively goes like "oh I can't wait to see the Rick and Andrea arc" "I can't wait to see how they handle carols thing" and it's actually so stupid. so mad they made Andrea a bitch cus she's one of my favorites comic wise.

Does anyone know where to find merch that pertains to the comics? Like, shirts, posters, mugs, etc. I can only seem to find merch related to the show

I picked up Rise of the Governor and its sequel a few months ago, and while I thought ROTG was only an alright read, I ended up reading its sequel. After RTW, I just couldn't thug it out and ended up only skimming through the last two. Maybe my expectations were too high, but I just didn’t fuck with the vision for the Governor in particular (I enjoyed most of the other characters but I won't talk about them here). I'm curious to see if others who’ve read these books feel the same. Spoilers ahead of course, and this post assumes you've read the first book or at least know the plot.

Also, English is not my first language and I'm not much of a reader in the first place, so I'm wondering if I just didn't understand the books. Please correct me if you feel differently because I want to like these books and I do want to sit down and read the last two if they are considered worth it.😭

Rise of the Governor felt fine compared to its sequels, maybe because Kirkman himself wrote the outline for the first book. I read that somewhere on this sub. However, what I felt held it back from being a strong story in its own right was its constant struggle to justify its own existence. The twist made it seem like even the authors weren’t convinced that the Governor had a backstory worth telling, and they ended up with a plot point that felt more like the plot of MGSV rather than the grounded character origin that appeared to be the goal.

The idea that Philip Blake wasn't actually Philip, but his brother pretending to be him, felt like a stretch at best and comically bad at worst. The venom snake bit just didn’t land for me. I had heard about the twist before reading the book and I really tried to give the concept a chance, but when I actually read it, it only felt like even the authors weren’t confident in their own plot. This might be why ROTG ends before anything terribly interesting with Brian and Woodbury happens. It quits while it's ahead, cutting the story off before it has to follow through on what it was building up to.

I also read the short story that takes place between ROTG and RTW, but it was only twenty pages and didn't fix any of the problems I had. It could've easily fit into a prologue to RTW, not sure why I had to fork over an extra doekoe to read it.

After ROTG, RTW immediately assumes the perspective of Lilly. (She's the girl who slimed Brian out in the comics & tv show, and there's an extra four or so books dedicated to her. I wonder how many people have read all those!) I liked Lilly well enough, but she comes completely out of left field and forces RTW to spend most of its time setting up her and her group. This just felt unplanned to me, as if the authors didn’t know what to do with the Governor's arc so they shifted the POV to a stranger and left us to assume cool things are happening back in Woodbury. The twist at the end of ROTG—where Brian introduces himself as Philip—would've worked well enough if it were a standalone novel, but when the sequel needed to continue that story, it gave off the impression that it couldn't handle the weight of what it had set up.

By the time the POV shifts back to Brian, he’s already le too far gone, and the most interesting part of his descent is already over. The book advertises itself as an exploration of how the Governor rose to power, but it skips over most of the actual rising. That's really my biggest issue with it. The only way ROTG works for me is by leaning on its own lack of content and relying on the reader to fill in the gaps for himself—it promises a lot but doesn’t deliver and leaves the audience with a case of blue balls that never really gets resolved.

The whole series is undermined by its weak foundation. The first book is built around a far-fetched premise of Brian LARPing as his brother, but the novel itself knows it’s shaky. That’s my guess as to why the twist comes at the last possible moment, with minimal meaningful foreshadowing as far as I picked up.

Brian's initial everyman characterization makes the twist even harder to believe. He’s a point A too far from point B, and instead of making that journey, Road to Woodbury teleports the audience to point B and expects us to accept that.

Since the series' conception, Brian has been in a catch-22 regarding his backstory. Grounding his story would ruin the big twist, but committing to the absurd MGSV lore just makes it feel ridiculous.

Writing four whole books to explain Brian’s villainy defeats the point of his character. In the comics, his extreme evil works as a plot device—the "anti-Rick"—and we can suspend disbelief. But stretching that character over four novels that try to take themselves seriously creates a constant uphill battle within the series to reconcile the realistic and relatable character it introduced in ROTG with the over-the-top pure evil of the Governor.

The Governor’s evil worked well for me in the comics because of its simplicity, and I think that’s why he became so popular (leading to these books being written). But the novels overexplaining his psyche diminish the mystery behind his nature and therefore his appeal. The lack of clear motive made the Governor more engaging as a first villain. Retconning him into Venom Snake did little to deepen his characterization; instead, it spoiled the character as the force of nature that Rick had to face to truly start his fight for survival.

If we consider comic Gov on his own, as he exists in the panels, the 'truest version' of the governor; the openness of his malignancy trusts the interpretation of his character to be realised by his performer. In the case of the televison series, I think they hit it out of the park. The very opposite of what the novels tried to achieve is what made TV Gov a great character for me. In the TV adaptation, the Governor's backstory remained mostly mysterious. His motives and actions were allowed to contradict themselves with the freedom that omitting his backstory provided, making him engaging and enigmatic rather than messy and confusing. This kept him closer to the platonic ideal of the Governor as a plot point in Rick's story. Meanwhile, the novels struggled to stay relevant to their inevitable conclusion as a part of Rick's story. The biggest of the resulting problems is clear early on: the character of Brian, as we meet him in ROTG, is almost irrelevant to the Governor that Rick encounters in the comics, an issue exacerbated by the clumsy handling of his transition from Brian into Philip and eventually the Governor. The novels are necessarily supplementary material to the comics, and they are written with the knowledge that they must eventually align with the events of prison arc. This made Brian's internal conflicts feel shallow and meaningless in the larger scheme of the story (as I'm writing this, I wonder if this could be the point?). The novels’ attempts to explain the Governor's descent into evil don’t make him more compelling to me, they only undermine what made the character work in the first place.

That's just what I thought about the first few books, though. Am I blind to some hidden genius in these novels because I'm salty about the lack of Governor? Or too much Governor?? Am I writing the novels off prematurely? Like I said, I'm not much of a reader or writer, and so I'm concerned that I have missed some fundamental elements of the story. So, I've only written my thoughts in hopes that someone will prove me wrong.

We don't need a million meta post. Post your concerns here. Thanks.

I just really like how he captures the essence and looks of the characters from the comic but makes them realistic and with great coloring and compositions too.