The Walking Dead's Robert Kirkman: "I Only Wanted to Write Comics"

Now that Robert Kirkman's The Walking Dead is a multimedia empire, it's sometimes hard to think of him as somebody who never wrote his comics with an eye toward developing TV, video games, board games, lunchboxes and more. This weekend at San Diego Comic Con International, though, while the major publishers were aggressively pushing their film development slates and fans were wandering the aisles bemoaning the fact that "Comic Con isn't about comics anymore," Kirkman took some time out to jokingly tell members of the press that the TV show and all the rest is "stupid stuff," and that what he really wanted to do was to write comic books. "I tell people from time to time that I only set out to make a living writing comics," Kirkman said. "I only wanted to write comics. The fact that I can pay my mortgage from a room on my house while I'm typing on a keyboard working on a medium that I love was the only thing I ever tried to achieve and the fact that I achieved that and all of this other--I call it stupid stuff--that I never expected...I never wanted a TV show. I was never like, 'Oh, my God, I hope this turns into a TV show.' I really loved comics, so the fact that it was a comic is enough but it's just beyond my wildest dreams and it's just very weird." He also added that while AMC has obviously been good to him, being in San Diego reminded him that he isn't one of the show's actors, or some other recognizable celebrity; even the creator of The Walking Dead has some measure of anonymity in the Comic Con crowds. "It's definitely bizarre," the writer admitted. "When a zombie tries to scare me on the street in San Diego and it's a zombie promoting a show based on my comic and they have no clue? I went by the AMC panel yesterday and I said, 'Can I go by this door?' They were like, 'Sorry, sir, you have to go wait in line over here.'"