Why The Walking Dead’s Companion Series Should NOT Get a Comic Book

What makes the concept of a comic book companion to Cobalt — nobody believes that’s what the show will be called, but since that’s the rumored working title for the pilot, we’re going to call it that for the time being — attractive is the same thing that makes the show itself seem like a good idea.

You can expand on a massively popular brand, while exploring heretofore unseen elements in the world of television’s biggest show…and all without doing anything that varies too wildly from the souce material on The Walking Dead itself.

What makes it a bad idea? Well, that’s a little trickier to explain, but some of the reasons actually kind of mirror some of Cobalt‘s appeal.

While it’s tempting to capitalize on the popularity of The Walking Dead‘s brand, it’s equally likely you’ll water it down. This is something Marvel realized about the Spider-Man family of books back when, shortly after One More Day, they unified the various titles under the umbrella of The Amazing Spider-Man, the best-selling and longest-running of the titles (and, helpfully, the one that got a movie franchise named after it). 

With two stories as unconnected as The Walking Dead and its companion are reported to be, it isn’t outside of the realm of imagination that Cobalt would be seen as just another zombie book and get only a minimal bump from being connected to The Walking Dead, especially if the always-busy Robert Kirkman had to outsource the writing to somebody else at Skybound (which, admittedly, seems unlikely). Potentially just as harmful to the brand would be if some readers, rather than pick up both, grabbed just one and split their dollars between them. Drawing readers off of The Walking Dead at this point in its lifespan is an admittedly remote possibility but it’s one that would have to be considered.

All of those, though, are considerations for any spinoff of The Walking Dead and can, probably easily, be explained away, overcome or flat-out wrong.

There’s also the question of the rights…in more ways than one.

It’s been rumored  that Daryl Dixon and other characters created for The Walking Dead TV series would never make their way into the comics in part because Kirkman would have to compensate AMC for their presence, either by buying/licensing the rights to the characters, or by giving them a percentage of the backend or the like. It’s easy to see why that isn’t worth it, especially because, as Kirkman notes, it’s often fun to have the chaotic elements of “new characters in the TV series so that fans have a harder time guessing what’s coming around the corner.

While The Walking Dead is arguably the most financially successful creator-owned comic on the market, though, it’s not guaranteed Kirkman would see that kind of return on his investment immediately with Cobalt. Paying AMC what they were due for use of characters developed at least in part with studio money might prove not to be worth it.

Especially because there’s a good chance he would also have to pay the actors.

Think about it: if Cobalt has been cast before the first page of comics is written or drawn, the odds are good that it would be subject to the same kind of scrutiny as any other adaptation — that is, that actors could be entitled to some kind of compensation for the use of their likeness, or at least that they would have to sign off on the use, which could be a one-time cost to persuade them to do.

But none of that is as compelling a reason as the biggest obstacle toward making a companion comic to a show that’s just launching: the comic would have basically zero lead-time to get ahead of the show, meaning that the two could be telling the same or similar stories at basically the same time, and nobody would be the “definitive” voice.

It would make the whole thing feel like an odd echo chamber, like doing a What-If story halfway through a big crossover event instead of after the event had ended. It’s inevitable that the writers’ attention would be divided, and the comic might suffer for that. During off-seasons, it would also start to get ahead of the show, which means you would have to diverge the two very early, thus defeating the purpose of doing a comic tying into the show, or run the risk of spoiling elements of the TV series immediately before the show returns to air.