While ‘The Walking Dead’ ended in issue #193 closing out Robert Kirkman‘s long-running zombie series, the creator has revealed that it was originally meant to end much sooner.

Thankfully, this didn’t end up being the case.

The following can be viewed as a spoiler if you haven’t read the comic only because it shows one way that the series could have come to a close and didn’t:

According to Kirkman:

“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.”

While this would have been a very fitting end to The Walking Dead,’  that falls in line with how many of the earlier stories were told where things had played out quite differently since Kirkman first thought up when he was younger.

Would you have enjoyed ‘The Walking Dead’ ending in the way which Robert Kirkman described above? If you’ve read ‘The Walking Dead’ #193, do you think that this would have been a better ending or do you love how he finished his long-running serial? Share your thoughts in the comments below!

 

Source: IGN