Ten Issues of growing dread and uncertainty.
Something like two years of waiting to see what happens; to maybe understand why.
I know we will probably never see a “why” in “The Walking Dead” because that would mean an ending and why stop riding that cash cow, huh?
At least we knew Crossed would have an ending; and I imagine there are some who read it only to see it end and not be left out when their other (in their minds) more “fucked up” friends finished reading it. I kept wanting to know where we would be going, I had imagined for a while that the narrator was the kid and that this future history was about how the main character would become one of the crossed and then hunt him.
Instead, when you look at it again through the lens of this issue you see what the crossed is really about. In every issue we meet a so-called clean person or group who is doing the very thing that the crossed, the MONSTERS are doing. Cannibal Children, homosexual rape and murder, casual cruelty to the less powerful. All there for us, and it wasn’t laid bare until the end. The Crossed is (and always was about “the clean ones) the Crossed is about the sickness that pervades us and we don’t treat it as such, at least when one of them has that big mark on their face one can easily separate the monsters from the innocents. By the end though; are there any innocents left?
This last issue caps the Horsecock story and addresses the issue of the Crossed’ level of intelligence, placing them somewhere in the clever toddler level with a mean streak a mile wide and a complex reasoning ability that lets them… I won’t give away more about this issue itself. I’m kind of glad this is over.
Where Black Gas covered much the same ground in terms of action on the page, Mr. Ennis and Mr. Burrows have attempted; I think, to elevate the message above the medium. These things exist, they are here already and if you don’t confront them, you are as much to blame as they are themselves.
