The Walking Dead Creator on Potential Animated Adaptation

The Walking Dead spans comic books, video games, and a live-action television universe at AMC — but is the network hungry for an animated adaptation? Creator Robert Kirkman adapted his superhero comic Invincible as an adult animated series for Amazon’s Prime Video, and his all-ages comic book Super Dinosaur inspired the children’s animated series of the same name. Now that both the Walking Dead comic and flagship television show are in the grave — Kirkman ended his long-running zombie saga after 193 issues in 2019, while AMC capped off the live-action version after 11 seasons in 2022 — the creator addressed a potential Walking Dead animated series that more faithfully adapts the comic book.

“I think it would be a lot of fun to do a faithful animated adaptation, but I don’t know AMC’s appetite for such things,” Kirkman wrote in response to a fan’s letter in the pages of the colorized reprint series The Walking Dead Deluxe #79.

In 2010, the network released an eight-minute, “fully-animated” motion comic adapting 13 pages from The Walking Dead #1 by Kirkman and artist Tony Moore. AMC also dabbled with comic-style animation in an animated segment of the webisode series The Walking Dead: Red Machete.

As for the live-action side of AMC’s Walking Dead Universe, Kirkman added that he’s “knee-deep in the future of Invincible” and thus too busy to be involved with writing the network’s Walking Dead spinoffs.(Kirkman hasn’t scripted an episode since season 5.)

“I’m very happy with where the show ended up. I think [showrunner] Angela Kang did a great job on the final seasons,” Kirkman wrote in the letters column. “I think every show has a wave of expectations that builds and builds up to its conclusion, and it’s very hard to navigate that wave as you reach the end, but Angela handled things really well. The parts of the show that were always most exciting to me are the parts that didn’t follow the comic closely.”

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