Earlier this week, it was revealed that today's
The Walking Dead #193 will be the final issue of the series. Image Comics has advertised a number of upcoming issues in order to throw fans off the scent, and we'll have details for you later today about how things wrap up for the long-running series.
In a letter to fans at the back of the final issue, Robert Kirkman sheds some light on how he originally planned to wrap the series up. It sounds like a grim and depressing ending, but one that would have arguably been quite fitting.
Be warned that possible spoilers for the actual issue could be included!
"The big storyline NO WAY OUT ended with Rick proclaiming that Alexandria was a place worth fighting for, that they could no longer keep moving from place to place... they had to take a stand, lay down roots and start building from there. Their nomad days were behind them. Well, for years... that had been planned to be... the end. Rick would make his proclamation, and the speech would end with a big close-up on Rick’s face, you’d turn the page, and Rick’s face would be the same, only it was a statue... and you’d zoom out and see the full statue with some vines growing on the bottom of it... cracks forming... and you’d realize that it was quite OLD.
"We’d keep zooming out until we saw that the statue was in Alexandria, the same place where he gave the speech, but it was different. It was old and rundown, broken windows and missing doors. We would keep zooming out until a zombie walked by, then another... and we’d see that Rick had brought them to Alexandria, given this grand speech about rebuilding civilization and SUCCEEDED to the point that they built a statue to honor him... but in the end, the dead won, society crumbled again, this time seemingly for good... and that was it."
Well, that definitely would have closed the series with a whimper rather than a bang, and it's hard to imagine how fans would have reacted at the time. According to Kirkman, he believes that it was "a TERRIBLE ending. Bleak, sad... made the whole story pointless. What can I say... I was young and most of the endings I wrote or came up with way back then... were pretty bleak."
The Walking Dead continued long past that point, of course, but an argument could definitely be made that now is a good time to wrap things up - especially after Rick Grimes' recent demise.
What do you guys think about this alternate ending for The Walking Dead's comic book series?