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The genesis for The Walking Dead’s Rick Grimes 2000 goes back almost as far as the series itself.
“Rick Grimes 2000” recently made its debut in the weekly anthology Skybound X from Image Comics, and creator Robert Kirkman explains how the character and storyline came about.
“I think [it’s] possibly the most fun and ridiculous thing I’ve ever done,” Kirkman said Saturday in Comic-Con@Home’s virtual Robert Kirkman @ Home panel. “I’m teaming up with Ryan Ottley, the superstar artist of the Invincible series. If you’ve been begging and clamoring for more Walking Dead comics … this is not it,” Kirkman joked.
“Rick Grimes 2000” actually goes back to 2010, in an out-of-continuity ending to the storyline presented in The Walking Dead #75. The issue’s main story ended with Rick getting hit in the by Michonne, but in the alternate ending, Rick awoke in a hospital bed — not unlike the way the series began in issue #1. Here, though, he awakens with a new, robotic hand — aboard an alien spaceship.
The non-canonical story provided a sort of far-flung origin of the zombie apocalypse, and “Rick Grimes 2000” continues that storyline. “This is a completely different take on the Rick Grimes character,” Kirkman said. “It is zany, it is weird, he has a laser sword, it’s action-packed.”
“It actually comes from a letter that was sent when The Walking Dead #3 was out,” Kirkman explained. “This guy wrote in and said, ‘Hey, you know I really enjoy Walking Dead, but you say this is the zombie story that never ends, but I don’t really see this having legs — I don’t know where this is gonna go after 75 issues or so.'”
“I said in my response, ‘Hey, you’re absolutely right. We’re clearly going to run out of ideas here and I’m not going to know what to do, and at a certain point probably around issue #75 I’m just going to put aliens in, just to keep this thing going. It’s going to completely jump the shark. It’s going to be awful but it’ll keep going.'”
“Then when we actually hit issue #75, which was something I never thought would happen,” Kirkman continued. “I thought it would be fun to actually do that, so I enlisted Ryan Ottley to do a backup story in that issue where we made it appear that aliens were invading, and the book was completely shifting gears.”
“Some people thought it was real,” Kirkman admitted. “But it was just a gag, and that story’s never been reprinted. We’ve never done anything with it and it ended up being only seven pages of material, and so we’re basically taking that seven pages and we’re expanding it into a massive 48-page story that is living in chapters in Skybound X.”
“Which,” Kirkman reminded readers, “Is in stores now, so if you haven’t already picked it up, please do so.”
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