The Walking Dead
The creator of The Walking Dead, Robert Kirkman, explains how his children’s influence made the series much darker.
Already on sale The Walking Dead Deluxe #57 and in this comic we can see how Rick turns into a living zombie to save Carl from an attempted rape by the marauders. In the column published where Robert Kirkman explains the idea behind all this, the author reveals that his children had a lot of weight.
“This is the comic where the marauders almost rape Carl, and Rick essentially turns into a living zombie to save him. He had planned the scene where Rick bites a guy like a zombie for a while. He thought it would be cool to take things to the point where Rick would have to behave like a zombie to survive.” He wrote Robert Kirkman.
“From there, it was just a matter of finding a situation serious enough to drive Rick to do that on The Walking Dead. And well, you see what I came up with. I mean, hell, it’s a dark book, we’re going to some dark places. It’s a wild world.”
“By now I already had children. And I don’t think this happens to everyone, but for a while after my children were born, it made me much more sensitive to violence. Scenes that wouldn’t have bothered me at all suddenly bother me more now that I have kids. So from time to time, it made me want to hold back on certain stories. And that made me feel like my kids were making me… soft. So what would happen was if I ever felt like I was going backwards… It would push me even further in this direction. To prove to myself that having children was not going to ruin the TWD series.”
Robert Kirkman He continued: “The weird side effect of that… Is that having kids… It made my job darker. What would happen is that she would start to think: You are only retiring because you are softer because now you have children. That would make me push against that notion and keep going no matter what. The crazy thing is, pre-kids… maybe I would have talked myself out of doing some of the darker stuff… but after kids, I forced myself to ignore that objectivity. So yeah… having kids made The Walking Dead a lot darker. You are welcome?”.
Robert Kirkman (image by cordonpress) creator of The Walking Dead
