Did the Walking Dead creator just reveal what caused the zombie outbreak?

Last year, Robert Kirkman abruptly ended his run of Walking Dead comics after over 16 years! Yet, in its entire run of 193 issues, we never found out what actually caused the zombie outbreak our characters were battling against for the length of the series.

Until now. Maybe. Did Kirkman just reveal the true reason on Twitter?

In short, probably not. It’s unlikely that Kirkman would actually allow his secret to slip over a tweet. However, when a fan asked him what caused the outbreak, he simply responded, “Space spore.”

Unfortunately, we’ll probably never know if Kirkman is being serious, but in the past, he has liked to joke with his fans about his books. He seems to be keen on the whole alien idea; after all, there are zombies in his world, so why not aliens, too? But as Kirkman has said many times, The Walking Dead was never a story about the origins of the outbreak, but rather about survival and how humanity adapts to a world ruled by zombies. How it all started is ultimately immaterial.

Funnily enough, this isn’t the first time Robert Kirkman has joked about aliens in his Walking Dead comics! A few years back he told Entertainment Weekly that he would receive letters from fans asking him to settle arguments about when the comic would end. He happily obliged:

"Very early on in the series I started getting letters where people would say, ‘You say you’re going to do this book for a really long time, but this idea doesn’t seem to have any legs. My response as a joke was, ‘Oh, we’re going to this until issue 75, and then I’m going to run out of ideas, and then I’m going to do an alien invasion and just kind of completely ruin the book. That’s when we’ll jump the shark and it’ll be terrible and everybody will hate it."

While it was always for the best that aliens were never introduced into the comics, I still find myself filled with curiosity about what could’ve been if Kirkman wasn’t joking. There’s still time for the TV show to introduce aliens, perhaps?

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