Robert Kirkman: Inside ‘Walking Dead’ Creator’s Twisted Mind, New Show
If you drive through Culver City, Los Angeles, past the fast food joints and tattoo parlors, you’ll come to a nondescript building tucked away on a side street. Go up to the fourth floor, and you’ll find a cozy office filled with folks chattering over gigantic iced lattes and copies of Fast Company in the reception area. Other than the partially decomposed corpse on the kitchen counter right next to the coffee machine, you’d have no idea that the end of civilization is being meticulously planned out here on a daily basis.
The rotting torso (its Christian name is “Bicycle Girl”) was a gift from an director Greg Nicotero and his FX team to the man who has dreamt up every possible variation of shambling, groaning, perpetually starving zombies: Robert Kirkman. The 37-year-old Kentucky native, comic-book writer and executive producer of AMC’s hit TV show The Walking Dead has turned the pages of a meager black-and-white comic book into “a zombie movie that never ends” juggernaut. The show not only spawned an L.A.-based spinoff — Fear the Walking Dead — but a hit show in which people discuss episodes immediately after they air (Talking Dead). Every time a major character dies, which is often, Twitter practically bursts into flames. The comic, which recently published its 155th issue, has sold over 50 million copies worldwide and been translated into over 30 languages. Cosplayers dress up as Dead heroes and villains at conventions; one Comic-Con attendee reportedly dressed up as a zombie version of Kirkman himself.
Sitting in a conference room in the offices of his company Skybound Entertainment — one which overlooks the same city that Fear has engulfed in post-apocalyptic flames — Kirkman smiles broadly beneath a buzzcut and bushy beard, alternating between warmth and a slight wariness. “You going to say I have a ‘bulky physique’ like the last guy?” he jokes, referring to a 2013 Rolling Stone cover story that included a comparison to The Simpsons‘ Comic-Book Guy. He’s now bringing another one of his comics, the supernatural thriller Outcast, to cable TV in the hope that it will do for demonic possession what his breakthrough work did for zombies. Centered on a tortured young man battling an evil-spirit epidemic in a small town, it’s a mix of religious horror and rural dread — The Exorcist crossed with Grant Wood’s “American Gothic.” (It premieres on Cinemax on June 3rd).
But despite the many projects, rabid fanbase and no longer having “12 credit cards’ worth of debt,” Kirkman still has a conflicted relationship with success. “Look, I live extremely comfortably now,” he says, “more than I have a right to.” He used to worry that he would never make it, and then that he peaked too soon. “It used to haunt me that this thing I came up with when I was 23 years old would define me,” Kirkman admits. “My tombstone will say ‘Here lies the idiot who made The Walking Dead.‘ But hey, there are worse things. I’m OK with that now.” It would not be the end of the world.