By: Russ Burlingame on April 10, 2012
The Hollywood Reporter are reporting that a sequel to Robert Kirkman and Jay Bonansinga’s The Walking Dead: Rise of the Governor is in the works, and that The Walking Dead: The Road to Woodbury will hit bookstores in October, right around the time that the third season of AMC’s television adaptation is set to premiere. During the third season of the show, The Governor is expected to be the main antagonist.
Taking place between the events of the first novel and those seen in the comics, the novel will explain how the execrable Governor rose to power in the city where Rick Grimes and company would eventually meet him.
“It’s going to be a direct sequel to Rise of the Governor,” said co-writer and series creator Robert Kirkman in an interview with Amazon. “We’re going to meet new characters as they come to Woodbury and see how Woodbury is founded, and how the Governor continues to grow as a character. It all takes place before we met the Governor in the comic book series, and there’s a lot more story to tell with that guy. We’ll also look at others—Lilly is going to be another focus. It’s going to be fun to explore those characters again.”
The move means that, if Kirkman and Bonansinga play their cards right, they could be setting up for a trilogy of novels featuring The Governoer, which would be canonical with the comic books and therefore completely flesh out the background of the character prior to his death.
“I always kind of looked at it like Rick and the Governor were two sides of the same coin,” Kirkman told Amazon, “and if Rick had gone down a certain path he could have ended up exactly like that guy. And so I had a story in mind of how he became that guy and what caused him to be that bad of a person.”
