What is it about zombies that you think gets to people: the viral aspect, isolation? What scares you about them?
Robert Kirkman: Nothing scares me about zombies. They’re ugly, you know, it’s a physical manifestation of everyone’s natural fear of death. I think that there is a primal aspect to everyone’s reaction to zombies in that you know you’re confronting the inevitable in a physical form, which I think is interesting. What’s really cool about zombies is that you can’t do a story about a zombie, a zombie story is always about the humans because zombies don’t have personalities, good zombies at least. No one is interested in the zombies, it’s how the zombies affect the people, and so because of that, zombie stories are always about how people deal with horrible situations, and I think that while there’s never going to be people in the streets being chased by zombies, everyone deals with horrible situations all the time in their life. I think that being able to see fake characters deal with the kind of pain and the loss that everyone in life goes through is cathartic and I think that there is a certain appeal to that.
Another thing is, everyone is concerned about society and how civilization is moving right now. You have things like the global economic collapse and you have climate change — just terrible, crazy things on the horizon, at least it seems that way if you watch the news. Everyone is a little worried about that stuff and the WALKING DEAD is kind of a fun, manageable exploration of what life would be like after the fall of civilization, so there’s a lot of aspects of zombies that I think appeal to a lot of people.
Do you plan to do both TV and comics for the foreseeable future?
Kirkman: Comics and TV… TV is my side job.
Source: Full interview @ Very Aware
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