Just ahead of its release on DVD, the folks out at Anchor Bay sent over a copy of The Walking Dead: The Complete First Season for us to review, and I have been looking forward to this since I first read that it was happening.

The Walking Dead: The Complete First Season joins police officer Rick Grimes, who’s just emerged from a coma. He discovers that the world he’s in now is much, much different from the one he left, in that this one is jammed full of the titular walking dead. And with a handful of other survivors, he sets out, looking for a safe place to call home as the hordes of zombies descend on anything they can find even vaguely resembling food. The problem? We vaguely resemble food. More than vaguely, in fact–we are food for zombies. But it’s not just the zombies that make life dangerous in this new world…it’s the other survivors, in an unsettlingly large number of cases.

Readers of the comic book will likely be unnerved by the sheer number of differences between the original comic and the dramatization–this is actually standard fare as far as this sort of thing goes–but the end result will still be full of zombies, and it will still be full of gunplay, and many of the high points of the original–especially the characters–will still come to pass.

The first parts offer this great “just getting caught up” sort of feel that’s actually plenty creepy in its own right. Yes, the concept isn’t exactly new–28 Days Later did it first–but it was as creepy then as it is creepy now.

Sometimes it’s a bit overwrought, and sometimes it works the drama button just a little too hard for its own good, but still, this first season is laying the groundwork for a thoroughly impressive dynasty that will, eventually, be a wildly impressive piece of work.

I’m personally dying to see how they handle the Governor, myself.

We’ve got a great start here, and if the next season–starting this fall–proves anywhere near as good as this one did, well, we’re in for a treat, make no mistake there.

The Screenhead Ten Scale hands The Walking Dead: The Complete First Season a nine out of ten, a reward for promise begun, and the hope for even better in the future. Man, am I ever looking forward to the second season of this!