Robert Kirkman Says The Walking Dead Will Never Explore The Actual Zombie Outbreak
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With Lost having found much success with the structure of an ongoing narrative interspersed with flashbacks, some have wondered why AMC’s hit series, The Walking Dead, hasn’t shown more glimpses of the characters during or before the global zombie outbreak. If you were eagerly waiting for the day when the show showed us what everybody was up to when things started going straight to hell, steel yourself for disappointment. Walking Dead creator Robert Kirkman says the reason both the show and the comic have largely avoided this subject is because he simply isn’t interested in it.
Speaking to TV Guide, Kirkman says, “In zombie fiction, you see the outbreak, you see the first days and the craziness in almost every other story told in this realm. I’m very proud of the fact that, for the most part, The Walking Dead has skipped over that part.”
The man has a point. We’ve all seen stories set in the midst of a zombie outbreak many, many times before, if only because it’s an easy way to filter the horror through the eyes of an everyman protagonist. The Walking Dead also uses that tactic, it just skips over the overly familiar bits courtesy of a comatose Rick Grimes and then gets down to the bigger question: how do the survivors adapt to the new state of the world?
If you really are wanting to see what might have happened during the early days of The Walking Dead, Kirkman has a couple of suggestions: “Go watch Zach Snyder’s Dawn of the Dead movie to see the early days of this, or Shaun of the Dead does it really well.”
