Robert Kirkman could seriously just buy a huge mansion complete with a money vault like Scrooge McDuck and swim in his earnings from ‘The Walking Dead’, the comic and the show, but this workaholic isn’t content to sit on his laurels. In addition to ‘TWD’, he continues to innovate with his superhero series ‘Invincible‘ and… well, there’s ‘Super Dinosaur’ but the less said about that the better. He has a new comic book/TV series brewing called ‘Outcast‘ which will confront the concept of demonic possession and, according to Kirkman, will hew close to the tone of ‘TWD’.
He went into detail recently, expressing:
“Outcast is about a guy named Kyle Barnes, and he is a guy who has been plagued by demonic possession his entire life. He’s had a lot of people close to him become afflicted with this phenomenon, and he doesn’t really understand why. When we pick up with him in the series, it’s a time when he’s deciding to learn more about this, to find out why this is happening to him in an effort to fix it so that he can get his life in order. So he sets out on a journey to figure out what demonic possession is, and along the way, while he is finding more and more about what this thing is, he starts to realize that there’s a lot more to it. There’s bigger stuff going on behind the scenes that he wasn’t aware of. He actually kind of trips into some world-threatening, end-of-the-world stuff that’s afoot. So he gets drawn into this much bigger story…
Like ‘The Walking Dead’ is the zombie movie that never ends, this is kind of another attempt to take a subgenre of horror, the exorcism story, and do sort of a “Greatest Hits” thing with it, like I did with The Walking Dead, but also, bring some new elements and look at things in a very new and different way. So there’s a lot of traditional exorcism stuff. There’s the kind of stuff you’ve seen in The Exorcist or all these countless movies that have been out for years and years; there are two or three a year that come out at this point. So there’s a lot of tropes and familiar things that you’re going to see that makes this an exorcist story, but there’s going to be so many new and strange things that come into play that I think it’s going to be a celebration of the genre, but also a tearing down of what it is and what actually makes an exorcism story. So it’s going to be both things at once.”
Are demons as cool as zombies? They’re certainly more proactive, so that could prove troublesome. I’m curious as to what new elements Kirkman can add to the genre. He’s certainly done a good job of taking established genres and adding a fresh take with ‘The Walking Dead’ and ‘Invincible’, so I’m very curious as to what ‘Outcast’ will do to establish itself within the possession concept.
And by the way, this isn’t simply a new comic book series. Kirkman has already made a deal with Cinemax to develop a TV series based on the book. (Cinemax is still a thing?!)
Are you intrigued to see what Kirkman has in store for the demonic possession genre? Will you be adding ‘Outcast’ to your pull list?
Source: Blastr
