In the zombie-infested world ofThe Walking Dead, Rick Grimes and his fellow survivors have gone through hell while trying to carve out a life worth living. And with the comic series long over,The Walking Dead’s next era needs to add some fresh ideas that fans haven’t seen before.
Beginning its almost 200-issue run over 20 years ago in 2003 and concluding in 2019,The Walking Dead, written by Robert Kirkman and illustrated by Tony Moore and Charlie Adlard, helped repopularize the zombie genre alongside 2002’sharrowing28 Days Laterand 2004’s stylishDawn of the Deadremake.
A black and white comic that made the transition into multiple different mediums in the years since its inception,The Walking Dead’s spinoff graphic novel series,Clementine, follows a character unrelated to Rick and his crew, with arecent Popverse interviewwith the book’s writer/artist, Tillie Walden, admitting thatThe Walking Deadneeds “new voices and new perspectives.”
According to Clementine Writer Tillie Walden
Bringing back Clementine, the fan-favorite protagonist of Telltale Games’The Walking Deadvideo games, Walden’s story picks up after the conclusion of that critically acclaimed interactive saga and features a slightly older Clementine after she leaves Ericson’s Boarding School, as well as her ward, AJ, behind, all in the hopes of finding some peace in her life.
Choosing to focus less on blood-spurting spectacle and more on what makes Clementine and the people she meets tick, Walden explains in her interview how having Clementine travel from the United States up to Canada andeventually over to Greenlandaffected her story, as well ashow diving into a culture outside of America positively shapedThe Walking Dead’s universe.
Asking herself what “other groups of people and other places that have other histories” were experiencing during the zombie apocalypse, Walden touches on how she was “…curious about how it would feel to tell one of these stories in a place that wasn’t predominantly American,” and how, ifWalking Deadis to continue, “this is the future of it.”
The Walking Deadwas one of Image Comics' best-selling and longest-running comic series of all time.
Explaining how the series should be all about looking outward and beyond the traditional southern American white male and “able-bodied context,” Walden clarifies that “when you enter these new spaces and you bring about new voices and new perspectives, I just think it’s a little more interesting to read” — a statement that rings true even outside the realm of comics.
No stranger to telling stories through the lens of a wildly diverse, multicultural, and multifaith cast of characters who ranged from being true leaders in the face of a crisis to cowardly self-serving human beings to outright brutish and over-the-top villains,The Walking Deadwas stillwidely set in southern Americaand populated by individuals from that area.
Often criticized for having a repetitive narrative, Kirkman at least always had characters worth rooting for or railing against. But sinceWalking Deadreally didn’t move away from its general setting nor have the ability to further diversify its cast while stuck in the same location, Kirkman made due in other ways that more than made up for it.
Of course,The Walking Dead’s comicdidmove from place to place as Kirkman’s story dictated it — Rick traveled from a hospital to a farm to a prison to the town of Alexandria and so on — but changing set pieces isn’t the same as what Walden means when saying thatWalking Deadneeds “other places that have other histories.”
Making a case for whyexploring internationalWalking Deadstories is important to the overall enrichment ofKirkman’s zombie epic, Walden’s reasoning for why these types of tales should be the norm forTheWalking Deadmoving forward is sound, especially if Kirkman continues to allow writers other than himself to play in the world he created.
When It Does, It’s Usually in a Different Medium
Yet for as groundbreaking and fresh asClementinefelt by the time it wrapped up its award-winning three-part story earlier this year, Walden’s unique take onThe Walking Dead’s dangerous post-apocalyptic worldisn’t the first time new perspectives and different locations have been introducedto Kirkman’s undead universe, comics or otherwise.
Receiving a live-action adaptation in AMC’sThe Walking Deadin 2010, this series has spawned at least five spinoffs, withDaryl Dixonfollowing the character as he continues his zombie-killing exploits overseas in Paris, itself inspired by the similarly set comic titledThe Walking Dead: The Alien, a one-shot that was told from the perspective of Rick Grimes’ brother, Jeffrey.
While theoriginalWalking Deadcomicis a masterclass in zombie horror, it has since branched out from its Robert Kirkman-created structure to feature even more interesting settings and unique characters, with the idea of the franchise further pursuing these kinds of perspectives and locations being exactly whatThe Walking Deadneeds to continue to thrive as a series.
