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The Official The Walking Dead Discussion Thread
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Started by MutantKeys,

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NewWorldOrder

NewWorldOrder

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Some people. :eyeroll:

 

http://cgi.ebay.com/WALKING-DEAD-COMIC-LOT-3-79-only-10-000-000-/140486565028?pt=LH_DefaultDomain_0&hash=item20b5a6dca4

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supapimp

supapimp

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kirkham walking dead article from USAtoday.com

 

Robert Kirkman reflects on a bloody good year of 'The Walking Dead'

 

By Brian Truitt, USA TODAY

 

Robert Kirkman's 2010 has been one for the record books. He rode his popular zombie comic The Walking Dead straight into mainstream pop-culture superstardom with a hit TV show on AMC, and picked up an Eisner and Scream awards as well as Golden Globe and Writers Guild of America nominations for his efforts.

 

All that work, travel and accolades haven't squashed his sense of humor any. Just ask about him having his own PR team.

 

"I'm selling out," Kirkman quips, hanging out at his Kentucky residence for the holidays. "I can never go back. I sit in my house and I just do interviews with nobody, just so that I can continually non-stop be interviewed. I go to my kids and say, 'It doesn't feel like I'm alive. Just ask me questions about anything!' "

 

AMC's freshman season of The Walking Dead this past fall, developed by filmmaker Frank Darabont, was a runaway hit, but Kirkman's priority is still the comic book. Image Comics recently released the 13th collected volume of the long-running series, and Kirkman begins a new story arc, "No Way Out," in issue 80 (out Jan. 5).

 

The TV show has strayed a bit from Kirkman's storylines, with some new characters, old favorites who haven't died yet and a visit to what's left of Atlanta's CDC headquarters for cop Rick Grimes (played by Andrew Lincoln) and his group of survivors in a zombie-filled wasteland. But Kirkman says it hasn't influenced the comic yet.

 

"Luckily, the show exists in the past of the comic, so it deals with things that I was doing seven, eight years ago," he says. "The Rick that exists in the comic book now that I am writing is very much different from the Rick Grimes that appears in the television show. It's really like doing two completely separate things because so much time has passed and the characters have changed so much and, you know, a lot of the characters have died."

 

That said, Kirkman admits that there were a few times working on the TV episode he wrote himself — the fourth in the first season — where he had to stop and remind himself that Rick wasn't ready to do certain things just yet.

 

"I like to call the one in the comic book 'Crazy Rick' because he will do anything he has to do to survive, even if it's seemingly wrong, just because," Kirkman explains. "There were some times when I had to pull back, but I was able to rein myself in and not doing anything too crazy."

 

Has that made him a sharper writer to a degree? "No, I'm pretty sure I'm still kinda awful," he says, laughing. "I'm not the best judge of my work. I hope that everything I do is making me a better writer, but I'm not really the judge of that. Otherwise I'd just be like, 'Yeah, I'm great!' "

 

The Rick comic fans see in the recently released Vol. 13 still can't catch a break in the karma department, even with him, his son Carl and the rest of the group living in the oddly comforting confines of a community outside of what remains of Washington, D.C.

 

Zombies aren't their biggest problem — it's more the distrust and paranoia that put Rick and his people on guard, and again our hero is thrust unwittingly into a position of de facto leadership.

 

"That's the sad thing about the whole book: There is no one that can step up and take that burden away from him," Kirkman says. "He is so willing to do whatever it takes to protect the people around him that by comparison, everyone will always seem not as good at doing what it is that he does.

 

"It's something that he never seeks out. It's this incredible burden that is always thrust upon him: No one else is going to be able to protect everyone like you're going to be able to protect everyone, so no matter how much that is ruining your life or how bad that is making things for you, for the sake of everyone you have to do this."

 

Rick is also clearly feeling the mounting emotional effects of surviving in a post-apocalyptic lead of the undead. In one particularly moving scene, Carl finds his father talking to a deceased loved one via toy phone.

 

"Parents are often not seen as being human, and Carl has kind of a heightened sense of that just because his father is the one who's always solving problems, the one who's always taking care of business that seems to be the smartest guy in the room at all times," Kirkman says.

 

"More so than normal children, Rick is being built up as this mythical figure for Carl, and to see them doing something seemingly crazy, it's going to be affecting Carl moving forward, seeing a small chink in his father's armor. That'll be an important theme moving forward."

 

Since Rick doesn't know what's normal any longer and fails to see the lines he crosses as he's slowly losing touch, Kirkman says that the mysterious swordswoman Michonne and other characters will act as his conscience from time to time so he doesn't fly completely off the rails.

 

(Michonne, as well as key villain The Governor, are two characters that fans are very excited to see in the Walking Dead TV series, according to Kirkman. "Frank has already hinted at the fact we'll be seeing Michonne as early as Season 2. The Governor is probably a little ways off from Season 2 — maybe Season 3 or beyond," says the writer, who would similarly like to work the TV character Daryl Dixon into the comic.)

 

The last few arcs of the book have been set in this sort of "safety zone" and return to civilization, the "No Way Out" storyline that kicks off in issue 80 is a return to zombie-filled danger.

 

At the end of Vol. 13, gunfire draws a horde of bloodthirsty flesh-eaters, and characters will be trapped outside of the community gates as well as walled in inside of them.

 

"It's going to be a very intense group of issues with them trying to figure out ways to get out for supplies and also keeping the massive amounts of zombies that are at the wall from pushing the wall over," Kirkman says. "Nobody's going to be relaxing anytime soon."

 

He likes to go back to those stories of zombie chaos to remind readers of the heightened sense of danger that's never far away.

 

"It's all about managing readers' expectations and trying to lull people asleep and then wake them up suddenly," Kirkman says. "Life speeds up and it slows down — that's just how things work. So the book is going to work the same way. Sometimes things will be relatively quiet and slow, and those downtimes are always followed by a return to a different kind of intensity."

 

All that gore and bloodshed, though, are not appropriate for Kirkman's children. Neither are some of their dad's other comics, including Haunt with Todd McFarlane and Kirkman's superhero book Invincible.

 

Enter Super Dinosaur, Kirkman's all-ages Image title debuting in April with his Astounding Wolf-Man co-creator Jason Howard featuring the adventures of a boy genius and a cybernetically enhanced Tyrannosaurus rex.

 

Both creators have very young kids — Howard's range from 4 to 8 years old, Kirkman's from 2 to 4 — and "it's a little frustrating to be doing something like comic books that everybody kind of associates as being a children's medium, for better or for worse, and not be doing anything you could show your kids," Kirkman says.

 

"It's definitely a time in comics history where there needs to be more things aimed at younger readers, just because the majority of comics out there these days are actually aimed at teenagers and above. It's definitely a market that needs to be fulfilled. This is our effort to do the coolest comic ever and make sure that it's appropriate for all ages."

 

Even the oldest fanboys may get a kick out of a T. rex with little arms operating bigger mechanical limbs thanks to joysticks. The idea for Super Dinosaur came from Howard's son suggesting his dad draw a superhero dinosaur. Howard sent Kirkman the sketch of a dino with a cape flying through clouds, and although Kirkman found the cape "a little lame," he liked the concept and sent him some rough art back with the character having robotic arms. Thus, a cool dinosaur character was born.

 

Super Dinosaur will replace the recently ended Wolf-Man in Kirkman's regular workload, which will be ramping back up next month when he starts on the second season of The Walking Dead.

 

By the time it premieres on AMC, those fans of the series may know the comic that much better. A compendium of the first 48 issues cracked Amazon.com's Top 100 Books list, and Kirkman reports that there have been spikes in overall sales for the comic, with the recent 13th volume their fastest-selling to date.

 

"It's good to know that there are still eyes out there to catch," Kirkman says, "and people are still coming on to the series and seeming to enjoy it."

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