The Walking Dead

The comic ran for 193 issues and ended when its author decided, without warning anyone. Robert Kirkman published the final issue in July 2019 as a surprise, having told retailers nothing, while the television series it produced was still running and would continue for three more years.

A comic that keeps going after the outbreak ends

Kirkman pitched the series in 2003 on a single argument: zombie films stop after two hours, and nobody had shown what happens in year five.

The premise is therefore not the outbreak but the settlement. Communities form, agree on rules, and fail for reasons that have nothing to do with the dead.

Kirkman drew none of it: Tony Moore drew the first six issues and Charlie Adlard the remaining 187. The comic killed its cast steadily and without ceremony, which is where the television series took its reputation from, and it ran in black and white for sixteen years.

Television turns it into the largest drama on cable

The Walking Dead reached AMC in 2010 and became the most watched drama in American cable history, with its fifth season averaging more than 14 million viewers.

It went through four showrunners in eleven seasons. Frank Darabont was removed after the first, and the production disputes that followed generated lawsuits that ran for years.

The audience fell steadily after 2015, to roughly a tenth of the peak. The series nonetheless produced six spin-offs, including Walking Dead: Dead City and Walking Dead: The Ones Who Live, both continuing characters the main series had finished with.

An ending announced in the last panel

Kirkman published issue 193 as a normal instalment. Retailers had ordered it as such, readers bought it expecting a continuation, and it closed the story.

He explained afterwards that announcing an ending changes how the final issues are read, and that he wanted the last stretch to be experienced without ceremony.

The issue sold out immediately and its price on the second-hand market multiplied within days. The decision cost the publisher a planned commercial event, and it is one of the few times an author has deliberately declined a farewell tour.

What it did to a genre and to a network

The comic has sold more than 30 million copies. Zombie fiction before 2010 was a film genre with a fixed shape. This franchise proved the material could carry serialised drama indefinitely, and a decade of imitators followed on every network.

It also demonstrated the limits of extension. Six spin-offs from one premise is what happens when a network holds an asset it cannot afford to end, and the ratings record shows the audience noticing.

The comic stopped when its author was finished. The television version stopped when the numbers did.