It’s a strong infection that leads to fever that kills someone.

Well… bites, and direct to blood contact with zombie gunk, causes death. No matter how anybody dies, as long as the brain is intact… they turn into a zombie. Whatever makes people come back as zombies after they die–it’s inside them. “Just to get this on record once and for all… and it is complicated, I know… here’s how zombification works. In it, he explained just how someone becomes a zombie thusly: The closest Kirkman ever came to going on record in describing what caused the zombie outbreak was in the Letter Hacks section for Issue 147. Zombies were inherent to that mission as antagonists and occasional environmental obstacles. He was more concerned with telling a simple horror (and later action/adventure) story with relatable characters. The Walking Dead concluded its run with Issue 193 last year and nowhere in those 193 issues is there any indication of what kind of virus or supernatural event could have reanimated corpses around the world.įor years Kirkman steadily maintained that the cause of the zombie outbreak was never important. And in the end, the writer was true to his word. In reality, Kirkman has always been adamant that the origin of the zombie pandemic on The Walking Dead would never be explained.

He confirmed as much in April via his account. Not only that, but Kirkman was once a contestant on Comedy Central’s and when host Chris Hardwick cheekily asked for an upcoming Walking Dead spoiler, Kirkman just flat out revealed that one day a character named Negan will arrive to kill Glenn on the show, several seasons ahead of the actual moment.Īlas, this Twitter exchange was one of those instances where Kirkman really was joking. Through 193 issues of The Walking Dead, he was fond of holding spoiler-y information over readers’ heads in his Letter Hacks Q&A sessions at the back of the book. Kirkman has a decent track record of spoiler-reveals. One could forgive the Internet Take Industrial Complex for taking Kirkman’s answer and running with it though.

The Walking Dead by Robert Kirkman