Game recognizes game, and The Walking Dead creator Robert Kirkman is not afraid to give props to fellow creative minds.
While Kirkman knows he's accomplished plenty in his own career, he's still quick to acknowledge creators he believes surpass him in certain areas. Among those is George R.R. Martin, who Kirkman admits is way better at one particular aspect of writing than him – and it’s something that fans of both Game of Thrones and The Walking Dead will agree on.
Speaking at a masterclass at Annecy, Kirkman gave Martin props for being the master at killing characters.
“He is the master and I am but the learner,” Kirkman remarked. “He is way better at killing characters than me.”
We have to agree with Kirkman on this one. While The Walking Dead featured its fair share of character deaths over the years, the franchise's deaths were nowhere near as plentiful or shocking as those that Martin cooked up within the pages of his A Song of Ice and Fire novels. There's also the fact that Kirkman and the creative team chickened out on many book deaths.
Although the show was faithful to many of the comics' deaths, there were several major deaths in the source material that Kirkman and the writers avoided in the show. Carol Peletier, Morgan Jones, Judith Grimes, King Ezekiel, and Father Gabriel Stokes are just a few of the major characters who die in the comics but see their fates changed in the show.
Interestingly, while The Walking Dead strayed away from many of the comics' notable deaths, Kirkman was not exactly gun-shy about the idea of killing off a main character during the show's early seasons. In fact, he nearly tried to kill off one of the show's most beloved characters, one who has helped keep the show going beyond the end of The Walking Dead.
“When we started on Walking Dead I was the lunatic in the writers’ room who was like, ‘I don’t know, just kill the main character, who cares? We’ll do something weird.' I was pushing to kill Daryl Dixon for a while. Any character in The Walking Dead at some point I was in the writers’ room saying, ‘Why don’t we kill them today?’.”
That's right, Kirkman actually tried to kill Daryl Dixon, a character who would become one of the show's most beloved figures and a face of the franchise. Perhaps Kirkman didn't have any hesitation in killing Daryl because the character was not one he had created in the pages of the comic that inspired the show.
Daryl was a blank slate for the show, as there was no character arc to follow in the pages of the comics given his status as an original character. It was likely freeing to Kirkman knowing that he could take the character in any direction, including to the grave, without it impacting the adaptation of the source material.
Thankfully, for the fans, Kirkman did not pull the trigger on killing Daryl, which proved to be the right decision, as he's kept the franchise going strong years after the flagship ended. Still, it's interesting to think how different The Walking Dead might have been had Kirkman taken a page from Martin's playbook and killed off more characters.
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