Skybound Comics Just Fed The Walking Dead’s Clementine to the Culture War

It’s difficult to continue writing about comics because, quite frankly, most people don’t care anymore. Between the collapse of Diamond strangling the industry, to professionals attacking fans, and the far-left ideology ruining continuity and classic characters, many fans have just checked out.

 I am counted among that number. Yet, Youtuber Wes Daugherity of Thinking Critical had a breakdown of a character that I could not ignore as Skybound, the supposed tent pole holding American comics aloft, allowed an ideologue to ruin one of their best Walking Dead characters, Clementine from the classic Telltale The Walking Dead games. 

Clementine was one of the protagonists in the spin-off videogames that are arguably the best Walking Dead videogames of all time. Her story spanned several games and DLCs where you met Clementine as a young girl and taught her how to navigate the dangerous world of an early zombie apocalypse.

 As an orphaned child, you find a frightened Clementine hiding in a tree house when she links up with escaped criminal Lee Everett. Playing as Lee, you protected this young, sweet child and taught her how to defend herself when you couldn’t. While Clementine taught Lee compassion and how to care for others as they met other survivors and banded together. It’s very rare when a game elicits any emotion and breaks through my toxic masculinity but, outside of John Marsden, I never cared more for a videogame character than Clementine.

And I wasn’t alone. All three seasons of The Walking Dead games are highly regarded as you witness Clementine grow from a young, timid girl, to a strong leader who happens to keep her humanity in an insane world. It was a no-brainer to continue her story in some form and Skybound decided that known identarian, Tillie Walden, was the perfect gal for the job.

After watching Wes’ video, I am glad I was checked out of comics and missed this ongoing travesty.

“In the end, this wasn’t creative evolution, this was ideological replacement.”

This is how Wes began his breakdown on Tillie Walden’s outright ruination of Clementine and putting an end to any continuation to the Walking Dead series for now. Skybound ordered a 100,000-print run of Clementine, an unprecedented number given today’s fiscal climate of American comics.

Wes posits that they did this to put all their chips behind the Clementine comic continuing the Walking Dead universe in graphic novel form. And this is backed up when you read the cover of Clementine #1 where Robert Kirkman is quoted as saying:

“Tillie Walden is the future. Her boldly authentic voice brings new heights to the world of the Walking Dead.”

But it didn’t work out as planned, which Skybound should have known as Wes says:

“This is a disaster happening in slow motion. And the fact that they’ve had no real sales chart presence for any of the three volumes shows that nobody really showed up. There was no real buzz for the Walking Dead. Despite a decade of long term success…”

After going through Book Scan data, Wes continues:

“Fans wanted authentic The Walking Dead type stories. They wanted to see Celmentine come out of the video games and into the comics as a survivor. But it’s clear they learned early on that she was going to be a social experiment.”

And we’ve heard this before. Self-insert or preaching to fans using Marvel and DC’s platforms has been the norm for nearly a decade now with the big two and this is why American comics are losing to Manga and other forms of entertainment. Now Skybound has allowed another identarian to use their platform to do the same thing with one of their most iconic, beloved characters in Clementine.

And we see this bear out when Wes quotes Tillie Walden when she says:

“We’ve sort of done a lot of what we can do in this American, especially southern, especially male, especially white, especially able-bodied context.”

As Wes points out, Tillie was not just rejecting the setting; she was rejecting the fans who liked The Walking Dead in the first place. Yes, I’ve read Clementine so you don’t have to, and gone are the characters such as Lee, Kenny, Christa and Omid, replaced by a poorly-drawn gaggle of women and disabled people, which makes no sense in a zombie apocalypse.

Of course, Clementine herself is now a lesbian, which was an option in Episode 2 (“Suffer the Children”) when you were given the choice of choosing between Louis and Violent as romantic partners. Tillie Walden obviously chose the latter and Wes then documents how she introduced a queer antagonist in book three of the comic, with her saying:

“It was really fascinating to work on and it suits where I’m at right now with queerness and queer stories, which is that, at this juncture, I’m craving complexity…

“…I want to explore the dark side because I feel like as I get older I see that dark within me more frequently, especially as you get further and further away from having come out and dealt with that initial blow of accepting who you are…”

So, it pains me to say that our beloved Clementine is yet another victim of this insipid ideology who may be beaten back but is far from broken. We have won battles in the culture war, but it’s far from over. Instead of fighting each other on X, we need to remain vigilant like Wes regarding the continued destruction of our culture.  

And check out my video below as I critique Skybound’s Transformers Energon Universe. Is it as good as everyone claims?

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I caved! For the first time, my debut novel, Fiasco of Adventures, is available digitally!  You can order the e-book on Amazon here or from my Linktree! And check out my website, TheMegacosm.com, for the latest news involving this universe. I’m also starting Rumble and Youtube channels. Give them a sub so I can start getting paid!