Robert Kirkman’s Walking Dead comic almost ended in this bonkers way
By Dan Selcke
Despite flagging ratings, AMC’s The Walking Dead is still shambling along, with nine seasons under its belt, a tenth on the way and quite possibly more after that.
On the other hand, Robert Kirkman’s Walking Dead comic — the source material for the show — ended unexpectedly with Issue #193, a super-sized edition that provided a coda to the story of Rick Grimes, the small town sheriff’s deputy turned post-apocalyptic leader of men. Kirkman’s book (with art by Charlie Adlard) had been running since 2003, so this was a big deal.
We won’t talk about how Kirkman’s story ends, but we will highlight a very interesting essay he penned for issue #123, an essay dug up by Entertainment Weekly for the occasion. There, Kirkman discussed what was at one time his plan for ending the series much earlier. “When the story got to Alexandria in issue #72, things were going to go pretty much as they did,” he wrote. “Rick and his crew were going to have trouble fitting in because of everything they’d been through. That would lead to conflict within Alexandria, and it would eventually lead to Rick taking over. The big storyline NO WAY OUT ended with Rick proclaiming that Alexandria was a place worth fighting for, that they could no longer keep moving from place to place… they had to take a stand, lay down roots and start building from there. Their nomad days were behind them.”
"Well, for years… that had been planned to be… the end. Rick would make his proclamation, and the speech would end with a big close-up on Rick’s face, you’d turn the page, and Rick’s face would be the same, only it was a statue… and you’d zoom out and see the full statue with some vines growing on the bottom of it… cracks forming… and you’d realize that it was quite OLD. We’d keep zooming out until we saw that the statue was in Alexandria, the same place where he gave the speech, but it was different. It was old and rundown, broken windows and missing doors. We would keep zooming out until a zombie walked by, then another… and we’d see that Rick had brought them to Alexandria, given this grand speech about rebuilding civilization and SUCCEEDED to the point that they built a statue to honor him… but in the end, the dead won, society crumbled again, this time seemingly for good… and that was it."
On the show, the gang reached the walled-off community of Alexandria in the fifth season. TV might be a very different place if the show ended around there…and like that.
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But it didn’t. Ultimately, Kirkman rejected the idea as “embarrassingly bad,” and kept the series going for another nine years. But all things must end eventually. Your move, AMC.
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