The
Walking Dead ended surprisingly but if you read the book the ending wasn’t as
surprising as you think. Robert Kirkman had killed off Rick Grimes an issue
earlier and once Rick was gone the soul of the book was gone. He was the first
character we met in this world. So in the last issue we saw Carl and his new
life conflicting with parts of his old life but saw that civilization did live
on past Rick. At the San Diego Comic-Con Kirkman reaffirmed that Negan was still
alive and Heath was as well. He says there is a Negan story to be told but isn’t
sure when he will ever write it. He told one fan that just because no one had
seen a walker in 10 years didn’t mean they were all gone but people knew now how
to deal with them. Kirkman wanted fans to know he has endorsed all of the things
seen on the TV show. But for all the fans who were upset the book ended with
#193 it could have ended much earlier. The title almost ended with the
four-issue No Way Out arc. That arc took place right after Rick's group got to
Alexandria. We hadn’t been introduced to Negan and Andrea was still alive.
Kirkman was to have Rick proclaiming Alexandria was a place worth fighting for
and where they would remain. We would have seen Rick's face as an old statue
with vines growing on it and from there we would have learned that the statue
was in Alexandria, which was now old and rundown with walkers wandering through
it. So in the end the dead would have won and Kirkman realized the ending was “a
terrible ending that made the whole story pointless. So that ending... in
hindsight was embarrassingly bad, but more than that, I wasn't ready to end this
series. Not by a long shot.” He also never thought the book would have gone on
for as long as it did.
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