Zombieland was a fun movie–goofy fun, video game fun, the kind of action ride that taps into your inner daydreaming child whose fantasies involve machine guns, monsters, and tasty processed dessert treats. But some of us take our flesh eating horror more seriously than that. And for those people, the real zombie land takes place in a monthly, black-and-white comic from Image Comics.

The Walking Dead is an amazing comic–every issue sucking you into a devastated world overrun by zombies, but where the few surviving humans are still the most dangerous creatures on two legs. Writer Robert Kirkman raises the stakes on tragedy and heartbreak every month, pushing his cast to their limits every issue. The latest issue, #66, concluded the “Fear the Hunters” arc, which had the Walkies encounter another group of survivors who have adapted their own tastes to those of the undead, hunting and feeding on the living as conventional food supplies run out all around. The five-part storyline was virtually zombie-free, and there wasn’t a roamer in sight in this final issue–yet it was easily one of the most horrifying chapters in the series to date.

If you aren’t following The Walking Dead already, either monthly or in trade paperback, then you are missing out on the best comic series on the stands. Get on board now, before the AMC TV adaptation makes it so your boss, your grandmother, or the bag boy at your local grocery can school you on what you’ve missed.

The few other books I read this week weren’t nearly as good.

Batman: Blackest Night #3 (of 3) was dull, continuing the get-on-with-it-already format of the various Blackest Night spin-offs, where various heroes (Dick Grayson and Tim Drake in this book) realize how ineffectual they are against the powerful Black Lanterns, have some vaguely emotional encounter with an important person from their past (their murdered parents and their parents’ killers in this book) back from the grave wearing the black ring, and then come up with a convoluted method of surviving the experience to end the unnecessary mini-series (they freeze themselves, relying on guest-stars Deadman and Etrigan the Demon to save their butts). Remember how Bruce Wayne–the real Batman–”died” earlier this year? Yeah, that might have been something worth exploring in the context of a series called Batman: Blackest Night.

Deadpool #900 was basically an anthology of overkill–the same joke, over and over and over, just like every other issue of every other Deadpool comic. The Merc with the Mouth is a fun character–Wolverine’s powers with Spider-Man’s sense of humor and a sociopath’s morality–but he’s too shallow and goofy to carry his own title. Oddly enough, Deadpool is one of my favorite characters to play as in Marvel Ultimate Alliance 2, he’s always welcome as a light-hearted guest character in other books, and I’m very much looking forward to seeing how the character plays in the title role of a feature film. But this book is for die-hard DP fans only.

The last book in my pull this week is the most frustrating failure of the lot. Hector Plasm: Totentanz, an Image book written by Benito Cereno, illustrated by Nate Bellegarde, and colored by Jacob Baake, looks like it could be a cross between Madman and Hellboy, a Tim Burtonesque goth adventure to set the Hot Topic crowds’ collective pierced, black heart aflutter. The titular character looks cool–Edward Scissorhands with a better complexion and a nifty green sword instead of finger sheers. The art–linework and colors, by Bellegarde and Baake, respectively, looks amazing. But I swear, I haven’t got a clue what the story of Hector Plasm is–what the character is all about, what is going on in his world, because the writing was all over the place, unfocussed, disjointed, and kind of pretentious. Points to Cereno for whatever part he had in inspiring the artists to draw such nifty-looking images–but if comics are the marriage of art and words, this marriage is on the rocks.