Robert Kirkman, creator of
The Walking Dead has a new book out covering the back story of The Governor - the real villian of
The Walking Dead. He co-wrote the novel with Jay Bonansinga and he recently sat down to spend a bit of time chatting with
New York Times about his plans for the series.
How long have you had this story in mind? Did you have the Governor’s origin planned out even before he first appeared in the comic book series five years ago?
I always kind of looked at it like Rick (the main protagonist of the series) and The Governor were two sides of the same coin, and if Rick had gone down a certain path he could have ended up exactly like that guy. And so I had a story in mind of how he became that guy and what caused him to be that bad of a person.
What made you decide that you wanted to tell the story in a novel rather than in say, another comic book series?
I dabbled with prose — I actually wrote a short story for “The Living Dead 2” anthology as a test to see if I could do it — [but I found that ] I don’t want to be the guy actually doing the typey-typey because that is terrifying. I never really wanted to do flashbacks in the comic-book series and I had this story I wanted to tell and a desire to branch out into novels but it never really came together until we found Jay.
How many books do you have planned? Will they spotlight other established characters?
We’re planning to do three and we’re keeping the details of the next two novels close to the vest because we want to announce them when the time is right and annoy reporters who try to ask us questions.
Be sure to check out the full article over at
Arts Beat on
The New York Times website.
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