CAUTION: SPOILERS FOR ROBERT KIRKMAN’S WALKING DEAD COMIC FOLLOW!
On TV, The Walking Dead’s Rick Grimes is still wandering the zombie-filled landscape, even if he isn’t technically a part of the show anymore. On the comics page, it’s a different story. The Walking Dead creator Robert Kirkman killed off Rick a handful of issues before he abruptly ended the 16-long-year run, which came as a shock.
The season 10 premiere of The Walking Dead is just around the corner. Before that, the cast and crew descended on Hollywood’s TCL Chinese Theatre for a red carpet event, where Comicbook.com caught up with Robert Kirkman and asked him why he chose to kill off his lead character.
“Rick Grimes fixed the world to the point where he was so safe that he could be killed by the weakest character in the book,” said Kirkman. “It’s a statement on how good of a job he did.”
Rick was killed by a character named Sebastian Milton, the son of the leader of the Commonwealth community. Despite the zombie apocalypse, Sebastian had led a relatively easy life, and decided that Rick was trying to upset the hierarchy of the community by making everyone equal. So he sneaks into Rick’s room at night, and after much yelling shoots Rick in the stomach. Rick bleeds out and becomes a walker, and his son Carl has to put him down.
“At no point in the history of the comic could he have been killed that way,” Kirkman explained. It was only after that Rick finally felt safe enough to relax that he was vulnerable to this kind of attack.
In AMC’s show, this hasn’t happened and may never happen, what with people like Walking Dead showrunner Angela Kang warning us not to expect the ending of the show to mirror the ending of the comics exactly; the two have already diverged to a great degree. On the show, Rick isn’t even with the rest of the group anymore, but has rather been written off. Andrew Lincoln will shortly be starring in some The Walking Dead-adjacent movies, but who knows if Kirkman’s final storyline for Rick will be part of them?
“It’s always possible that we could give that storyline to a different character, or that could somehow live in the Rick Grimes movie series,” Kirkman said. “Certainly can’t say anything further than that.”
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That’s about as good an answer as you can expect from Robert Kirkman. The Walking Dead season 10 premieres on October 6, only on AMC.
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