Robert Kirkman Says His Kids Made The Walking Dead Darker

[Warning: This story contains spoilers for The Walking Dead Deluxe #57.] “This was a tough one,” creator Robert Kirkman wrote in the letters column ending The Walking Dead #57, published in 2009. “Sometimes writing this comic is hard.” The issue — which is presented in full color for the first time as part of Image Comics’ The Walking Dead Deluxe reprint series, on stands now — sees Rick Grimes become a “living zombie” to save his son, Carl, from an attempted rape by marauders. In a scene that inspired the season 4 finale of the AMC series, Rick rips out a marauder’s throat with his teeth before gutting the man who has pinned down his young son. 

“You don’t just come back from something like that,” says Abraham Ford, who committed a similar act of violence after his family was attacked. “You don’t rip a man apart — hold his insides in your hand — you can’t go back to being dear old dad after that. You’re never the same. Not after what you did.” Rick admits his savagery against the marauders “isn’t the first thing to chip away at my soul until I wonder if I’m still human. It probably won’t be the last.”

“My son is all I have. I don’t know what I wouldn’t do to protect him,” Rick admits. “Sometimes that scares me… but it doesn’t make it any less true.”

In new creator commentary included in the colorized deluxe version, Kirkman explained the origins of what “may be the darkest issue yet” — coming just issues after Rick’s wife, Lori, and their baby daughter, Judith Grimes, violently died in the Governor’s assault on the prison. 

“This is the issue where Carl nearly gets raped by marauders, and Rick essentially becomes a living zombie in order to save him. I’d had the ‘Rick bites a guy like a zombie’ scene planned for a while,” Kirkman wrote, adding that he “thought it would be cool to push things to the point where Rick had to behave like a zombie in order to survive.” 

“From there, it was just a matter of coming up with a situation dire enough to drive Rick to do that,” Kirkman continued. “And well, you see what I came up with. Eek. I mean, heck, it’s a dark book, we go to some dark places. It’s a savage world.” 

The creator went on to explain that it was his own experience as a father that motivated him to push The Walking Dead into an even darker — and more violent — direction over the book’s 193-issue run. 

“By this point I had kids. And I don’t think this happens to everyone, but for a time after my kids were born, it made me significantly more sensitive to violence. Scenes that wouldn’t have bothered me at all suddenly upset me more now that I had kids,” Kirkman wrote. “So, from time to time, it would make me want to hold back on certain storylines. And that would make me feel like my kids were making me… soft. So what happened was if I ever felt myself pulling back… it would make me push even further into this direction. To prove to myself that having kids wasn’t going to ruin the series.” 

Kirkman continued: “The odd side effect of that… is that having kids… kind of made my work darker. What would happen is that I would start to think, ‘You’re only pulling back because you’ve gone soft because now you have kids!’ That would make me push against that notion and go forward no matter what. The crazy thing is, pre-kids… maybe I would have talked myself out of doing some of the darker stuff… but post-kids, I forced myself to ignore that objectivity. So yeah… me having kids made The Walking Dead much darker. You’re welcome?”

The Walking Dead Deluxe #57 is on sale now from Image Comics.