The Walking Dead Creator Robert Kirkman On The Series’s End

With the third season premiere of AMC’s The Walking Dead looming this weekend, Robert Kirkman is a pretty in-demand guy. At New York Comic Con, he could hardly make his way around the Skybound booth, conducting interviews with iFanboy and ComicBook.com in between handfuls of fans who wanted his time for signatures, photos and conversation–and that’s just in the course of fifteen minutes.We stole him off the show floor and sat down with him at the Skybound booth to talk about Invincible, Thief of Thieves and (of course) The Walking Dead. Want to know a little bit about how Kirkman plans to end The Walking Dead? Read on…The thing everybody’s talking about is, of course…The Death of Everyone in Invincible, right?Oh, yeah.How’s it work? Are you trying to up the ante? Becuase we had Mark Grayson at death’s door for a while…He gets beaten up a lot, that’s true.So, is it difficult? Obviously you’re looking across the aisle and Marvel wants to kill Spider-Man this week, and you’ve got this book that’s been consistently excellent but you can’t count on it to sell 150,000 issues because you say, “This month…Someone DIES!” So is this having some fun with the readers?Invincible does, to a certain extent, tell stories that can be somewhat meta. It’s a very compelling story that we’ve been building to for years but at the same time, it’s like, “It’s the death of everyone!They kill one character, we kill all the characters!” I like having fun with that stuff.Invincible is a superhero comic that, to a certain extent, is competing with those big superhero comics–and so I like to acknowledge that and find ways. So yeah, it’s definitely poking fun of that to a certain extent but at the same time it is upping the ante, it is the natural evolution of the kind of stories we’ve been telling in Invincible and it is a very important character story that deals with who Mark Grayson is and what he’s learned over time and what kind of person he’s going to be from here on out. And so it all has a basis in character which is important.