The Walking Dead, like Game of Thrones, is a popular cable television show that (a) features mythical monsters terrorizing townsfolk, and (b) is based on an ongoing, as-yet-unfinished work by a single author. And now we can add a third similarity: Both authors claim to know how their stories will end.
George R.R. Martin revealed last month that he knows how Game of Thrones will end, saying that some fans have already guessed the ending based on the clues he’s laid out so far. In an interview with EW, Walking Dead creator Robert Kirkman says he too has a specific endpoint in mind, if not an exact timetable for when it will happen.
While Kirkman is not sure how many Walking Dead comics he has left in store, he did share one interesting nugget: He knows how it will end. “I do know what I’m building toward, yes,” confirms Kirkman. “I don’t know exactly what issue that’s going to fall on, per se, and I do have a lot of road laid out before that that is going to take a long time, but I certainly know exactly what I’m building to.”
He continued:
“From the very beginning I would always plot these big, long overarching stories. So it’d be like, oh, they’re going to get to the prison, then this is going to happen and then that’s going to happen and that’s going to happen. I wouldn’t really map out how many issues those were going to take, but I would always make sure that I had somewhere between two and ten years of story mapped out ahead of me. About a year or two ago, I finally nailed down exactly what I want the ending to be.”
So there you have it. Fingers crossed for Daryl moving to Hawaii and starting a band.
