The Walking Dead: Robert Kirkman Has A Good Idea When Everyone Is Dying

“No one is safe” has long been one of the comic’s tag lines and it’s something that Kirkman readily applies to AMC’s TV adaptation — so much so that one of the few survivors from the first issues of the comic, Andrea, died at the end of Season Three. As did Sophia, Carol’s daughter and still alive in the comics, although around the time she died the show had kept alive a number of characters who were already dead in the comics, including her mother, so it seemed more like a trade-off.

In any event, Kirkman says that even as the TV series diverges from the comics, he still feels like he has a pretty good sense of each character’s lifespan.

He revealed as much during an interview with Sirius XM’s Entertainment Weekly Radio, and it was picked up by the magazine’s website. Here’s the pertinent excerpt:

When Robert Kirkman stopped by Entertainment WeeklyRadio (SiriusXM, Channel 105) while out at Comic Con, Jessica Shaw and I asked him about how tough it is to say goodbye to someone when they are killed off the show. “It’s kinda worse than that,” says Kirkman. “Because I got a pretty good idea when all of them are dying. To a certain extent, if we follow the comic, like possibly even more than [showrunner] Scott [Gimple] knows.”

Kirkman then began pointing at imaginary bodies around the room to illustrate his point. “So I’m always like…two years, three years, six months, two weeks, oh, God this is awful! It’s really rough. Doing the comic, it was fine because it was just lines on a paper. Whatever. We’re killing that guy. Cool. But the show, it sucks because we all work together, we hang out, and have a great time. But, you know, the story’s gotta get done and people gots to die, as I like to say. It’s pretty rough.”

In many cases, of course, that’s hardly surprising: most of the characters on the show have already died in the comics, and since Gimple took over as showrunner, the series has been running more close to the comics’ continuity than it did under Frank Darabont or Glen Mazzara.

You can check out the full interview on Entertainment Weekly Radio at the link above.