While The Walking Dead is the hottest show on television right now, eventually a day will come where it’s going to end. If AMC has their way, it might take a meteor hitting the earth to cause it. But nothing lasts forever, especially TV shows not named The Simpsons.
Successful comic books are known to last a lot longer, and even though The Walking Dead creator Robert Kirkman still plans to push out new issues for many years to come, that doesn’t mean he hasn’t thought about how things wrap up.
“Yeah, I know exactly how it ends, and I’m always taking baby steps toward that point as I’m telling the story,” he said in a recent interview with Entertainment Weekly. “I know what the end point is, and at the end of the day, I want this entire long narrative to be a complete story with a beginning, middle, and end.”
And considering AMC has a massive multi-million dollar interest in Kirkman’s world, do they get to know what his plans are?
“No, there’s no communication whatsoever,” he revealed. “They have no approval over what happens in the comic … So, they’re kind of a hundred percent in the dark, which I guess is pretty remarkable, and I would probably say it’s a testament to the trust that AMC has in me. I mean, I guess to a certain extent, at this point, the comic book is kind of a workshop of future seasons of the show, and it’s fun to think that I can just completely torpedo the story if I wanted to.”
It goes past AMC network execs being kept in the dark too. Kirkman said The Walking Dead writer and producer Scott Gimple is such a massive fanboy that he gets angry if Kirkman mentions anything even vaguely related to the future of the comics. So the creative wall between the show and comic is pretty tall, and topped with anti-spoiler barbed wire. Hey, it’s worked out pretty well so far, so why mess with a good thing?
