3.5
There was an excess of chatter in this one, but once the action started, it was quite a ride. It was good to get a glimpse at Negan's back story, though he's still a crazy git who's not to be trusted. I'm foreseeing a pretty bad end coming for this storyline.
There were some good spreads in this volume, but my favorite piece was an extra large panel of Maggie and Hershel after the battle at Hilltop. Fantastic.
( )

Kind of boring for a war. Maybe I wasn't in the right mood for it. The art, the writing, the character development, none of it really captured my wonder. ( )

I enjoyed this one. Not quite as much as previous ones, but it got the job done.

Unfortunately, I find many of the newer characters a little interchangeable. This series has a large cast and the art, while quite good, doesn't (at least for me) do enough to make some of the characters distinctive, so I find there's time when I'm reading a character exchange, and I'm lost for a bit until I puzzle out who they are.

The second complaint was that this one felt rushed. There was a LOT of action here, but with some pages with 16 panels, sometimes rocketing from one plotline to another to another, I just wanted it to slow down a bit and show us the consequences of all this stuff. Even an interesting Negan plotline seemed to get short shrift.

Hey, they can't all be classics, right? And this is leading to an even greater calamity, but still... ( )

This volume was just terribly, terribly predictable.

What do you want to bet the group will need to flee to Ohio? ( )

It feels like the crescendo for this arc is being dragged out for a little too long, which means it's all a little less exciting for me. Still interested in the next bit though. ( )