Poll of the Day > Did any of the Walking Dead content ever say how it all started?

(+) Yeah! (+)

Just curious.

Drew Barrymore read aloud from the Necronomicon during a meteor shower while a Voodoo Priestess worked in a lab to perfect the T-Virus

Robert Kirkman went on record to say it came from space

JixHedgehog posted...

Robert Kirkman went on record to say it came from space

That was actually a lie he told the publisher. He told them it came from aliens so it would seem "unique" and they'd publish it (since they'd already rejected it two or three times by that point). He's explicitly said in interviews he never had any intention of ever having aliens in it, and he was just lying about it.

The origin of the zombie virus in Walking Dead is the same cause of the zombies in Night of the Living Dead (which was the direct original inspiration). Namely, there is no known cause, because it's not important to the story, and the unknown is scarier than knowing. Whatever you can personally imagine will be more frightening or interesting than anything Kirkman could come up with and tell you.

He mentioned it at a convention ..then later in a tweet

.. then yeah, 3 months later he said he was joking

boooooo!

Part of the reason it's never known is that the main story focuses on Rick and he is in a coma while the initial stuff goes down.

If you watch the first episodes of season 1 it picks up month's into the post Zombie world. Anyways society collapses so even those that were around and aware during the beginning still have no idea. It's also canonical that in The Walking Dead universe zombies aren't a thing in that world. Thus why you never hear them referred to as zombies, and why the show is The Walking Dead.

I assume some Walking Dead thing will finally give more answers with all the spin-offs coming, but who knows when that happens.

JixHedgehog posted...

He mentioned it at a convention ..then later in a tweet

.. then yeah, 3 months later he said he was joking

boooooo!

Could be worse. He could have pulled a Y: The Last Man.

With that one, Vaughan had characters in-universe constantly speculate on what the origin of the plague was, so there were about a half-dozen different possibilities mentioned in the comic. And then he just told people that one of them was accurate and the canonical answer without actually saying which of the theories it was. Because he wants the reader to decide for themselves.

that's what fear the walking dead was supposed to do, it failed miserably

ParanoidObsessive posted...

That was actually a lie he told the publisher. He told them it came from aliens so it would seem "unique" and they'd publish it (since they'd already rejected it two or three times by that point). He's explicitly said in interviews he never had any intention of ever having aliens in it, and he was just lying about it.

The origin of the zombie virus in Walking Dead is the same cause of the zombies in Night of the Living Dead (which was the direct original inspiration). Namely, there is no known cause, because it's not important to the story, and the unknown is scarier than knowing. Whatever you can personally imagine will be more frightening or interesting than anything Kirkman could come up with and tell you.

There was recently a comic called Skybound X that had an intentionally bad Kirkman-penned story where the aliens who seeded Earth with the 'zombie virus' showed up and resurrected The Governor into a cyborg, Rick had an alien outfit, it was so goofy.

I wish they would go into it though.

Thats something I would find fascinating.

space spore

Krazy_Kirby posted...

that's what fear the walking dead was supposed to do, it failed miserably

That show only showed the beginning of the outbreak, I don't think it ever explained where it came from