The Hero Wears the Hat

Carl as 1.5-Generation Immigrant and True Protagonist

by David Hopkinson The Walking Dead

Two children, a girl and a boy, hold hands. The boy wears a cowboy hat and a bandana tied around his neck. In front of them is a tall chain-link fence. A few yards farther away, there is another fence and then another. Beyond that, clutching, clawing, and snarling, is an uncountable mass of zombies. The children face the zombies, taking it all in. The boy turns to the girl.

“You–are you still scared of them?”

“I was. I used to be. I still don’t like the sounds they make, but I’m not scared of them anymore. Mostly I just feel sorry for them.”

This moment in issue twenty-one of The Walking Dead says much about the series and how people acclimate to a new world. As an ongoing comic book, The Walking Dead has always been about the long-term effects of a zombie apocalypse–not just how a group of people escape the … read more»

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by Robin Wassermanon the Uglies series

This whole game is just designed to make us hate ourselves.

–Shay, in Uglies

I am a natural born sidekick.

I say this with neither pride nor shame. It’s just a fact of my life that for every time I’ve been the star, there have been approximately 8 million more times … read more»

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by Tamara McClintock Greenbergon the Twilight Saga

The Twilight Saga appeals to different readers and viewers for a variety of reasons; adolescents love the way they can identify with the main character’s burgeoning sexuality and its subsequent awkwardness, young people raised by less-than-attentive parents can connect with feelings of being left on one’s own, and adults are … read more»

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I got to know Anne McCaffrey through the Writers of the Future, a program initiated by L. Ron Hubbard to help discover and promote budding writers.

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