Walking Dead starts out Rick-against-everyone but veers towards a story about scrappy, regular folk coming together to more or less form a democracy, against a backdrop of total chaos. I read this as retelling a certain story of America, with the zombies standing in for brutal nature (and Native Americans!) and the protagonists the Europeans, creating a few different outposts of "civilization". I wrote about this reading here: https://blogtarkin.wordpress.com/tag/walking-dead/