Robert Kirkman wants more cliffhangers on 'The Walking Dead,' not less
Robert Kirkman is totally chill with where the The Walking Dead halted at the end of Season 6.
Fans of the AMC show got a surprise in the sixth season's final episode when Negan (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) made his debut. It wasn't his arrival that surprised; it was his first, brutal act and the mystery surrounding it.
In a scene pulled straight from issue #100 of The Walking Dead comics, Negan paces back and forth in front of Rick Grimes and friends as they're held at gunpoint. A drawn-out recitation of "Eeny, Meeny, Miny, Moe" ends with one major character's head smashed like a watermelon by Lucille, Negan's barbed wire-wrapped baseball bat.
You May Also Like
It's immediately clear who the victim is in the comic, but the show intentionally leaves the question of "who?" dangling. We witness Negan's vicious assault from a first-person perspective, and then the episode ends.
"We're certainly not going to end Season 7 on a cliffhanger," a chuckling Kirkman told Mashable during a New York Comic Con-adjacent event hyping Stubborn Soda's new Skybound Entertainment-focused series of video shorts.
"It was definitely a weird thing to see people angry over a cliffhanger. I could see being disappointed in a cliffhanger. But I get a lot of tweets where people are like, 'It's just a ratings grab.'"
Kirkman didn't even bother pointing out the obvious here: that TV shows exist to attract as many viewers as possible. In his eyes, the creative team behind the series took a real chance with the Season 6 finale.
"People watch the show. People are gonna watch the show," he said. "I feel like, if anything, [the cliffhanger] was a storytelling risk that could have cost us viewers. So it was definitely a storytelling decision."
The outcry following Season 6 was all the more strange given that Kirkman's Walking Dead comics revel in cliffhangers. Virtually every issue ends with a teasing hint toward some major story point in the next issue. Lots of comics embrace the same practice.
"I've always been pushing for more cliffhangers on the show just because every single issue of the comic is a cliffhanger of some kind," Kirkman said.
"Sometimes a really intense one, sometimes ... it's to a lesser degree. But it's always something that leaves you wanting more and leaves you going 'Oh my god, this next issue needs to come sooner.' That's what we're always trying to do."
While Kirkman is involved in the high-level creative decisions, he hasn't written a script for the show since the second episode of the fifth season. That's intentional. He doesn't see the need.
"One of the reasons I started writing less scripts is we're following the comic a little bit more closely," he said. "So I feel like my voice is still in there even though I'm not actually writing scripts."
Even with slightly different casts of characters, the show regularly lifts entire chunks of dialogue and scenes from the comic. That doesn't mean the character who dies in issue #100 will also be the one Negan bashes to pieces in the Season 7 premiere, but it does give Kirkman the comfort of knowing that his creative vision is intact.
"I think that [showrunner Scott M. Gimple] and everybody working on the show ... do an amazing job. And for the show to be as exciting and compelling and engaging as it is after six years, going into our seventh season, is a huge achievement in and of itself," Kirkman said.
"I'm just really proud of it. Really proud to be involved with it."
Topics Comics The Walking Dead
Adam Rosenberg is a Senior Games Reporter for Mashable, where he plays all the games. Every single one. From AAA blockbusters to indie darlings to mobile favorites and browser-based oddities, he consumes as much as he can, whenever he can.Adam brings more than a decade of experience working in the space to the Mashable Games team. He previously headed up all games coverage at Digital Trends, and prior to that was a long-time, full-time freelancer, writing for a diverse lineup of outlets that includes Rolling Stone, MTV, G4, Joystiq, IGN, Official Xbox Magazine, EGM, 1UP, UGO and others.Born and raised in the beautiful suburbs of New York, Adam has spent his life in and around the city. He's a New York University graduate with a double major in Journalism and Cinema Studios. He's also a certified audio engineer. Currently, Adam resides in Crown Heights with his dog and his partner's two cats. He's a lover of fine food, adorable animals, video games, all things geeky and shiny gadgets.
