The Walking Dead Comic Could Have Kept Going For 300 Issues: "We Chose to End It"

Over its 16-year run, The Walking Dead killed off characters without warning, including — spoiler alert! — its seemingly invincible protagonist, Rick Grimes. But creator Robert Kirkman saved the most unexpected death of all for last: the book itself. In 2019, after 193 issues, Kirkman and artist Charlie Adlard concluded their long-running zombie comic with an extra-sized epilogue, which only revealed itself as the final issue when readers turned to the last page. "This is the end of The Walking Dead," Kirkman wrote in the letters page of issue #193. "That's it… it's over… we're done." 

But the book, which went so far as publishing fake covers and solicits for future issues to conceal the surprise ending, could have crossed the milestone 200th issue — and even 300 issues. (Had The Walking Dead maintained its monthly schedule, the book would be approaching issue #250 today.) In The Cutting Room Floor with Robert Kirkman special feature included in this week's The Walking Dead Deluxe #80 — the reprint series publishing original the black-and-white issues in color for the first time — Kirkman explained structuring the book in blocks of "event stories," which date back to issues #43-#48. 

"The idea here is that with a long-running series, things are going to quite down. People are going to lose interest, so you need to keep goosing things, propping the series up, applying tent poles, if you will. A series needs to be tended to like a garden," Kirkman writes as issue #80 kicks off "No Way Out." "It's not enough just to write a good story (or, y'know, attempt to). You also need to be constantly devising ways to drive people to that story."

"Event storylines give you something to market. They give you a reason to send a poster to stores, to set up new interviews, to get people talking about the book," he continues. "So that's why they happened in The Walking Dead every 12 to 18 issues. Yes, even after the TV show happened. The thinking was, sales would eventually drift down, so we had to get those as high as possible so that when the drift did begin, the book could last for a good long time. That's how you keep a book selling high enough to get... nearly to 200. And to be clear, we could have easily kept the book going to at least issue 300 if we'd wanted to. We chose to end it when we did."

In issue #123, published in 2014, Kirkman revealed that he once planned on ending the book when Rick Grimes' group of survivors settled at the Alexandria Safe-Zone (during issues #67-#72, published just before AMC adapted the comics for television in 2010). The Walking Dead would ultimately run for another 100-plus issues. 

Just two weeks after The Walking Dead #193, Kirkman appeared at San Diego Comic-Con 2019 to explain why the book ended ahead of its milestone issue #200:

"I know people criticize the book for being repetitious sometimes. I go on the internet, I'm human, and I go on the internet and see things that make me sad — and then I go back on the internet to look for more things to make me sad," Kirkman said, adding that the storyline naturally built to the Commonwealth arc that ended the comic. "I feel like the story wasn't repetitious. I felt like it escalated. But I was acutely aware of how it could become repetitious and I really wanted to avoid that. I wanted there to be a narrative flow, and in order to achieve that, I knew I would have to wrap it up."

The Walking Dead Deluxe #80 is on sale now from Image Comics.