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The Walking Dead took a note from Todd McFarlane on starting a comic

By Adam Carlson

NEW YORK, NY - OCTOBER 06: Robert Kirkman speaks onstage during The Walking Dead panel during New York Comic Con at The Hulu Theater at Madison Square Garden on October 6, 2018 in New York City. (Photo by Andrew Toth/Getty Images for New York Comic Con)
NEW YORK, NY - OCTOBER 06: Robert Kirkman speaks onstage during The Walking Dead panel during New York Comic Con at The Hulu Theater at Madison Square Garden on October 6, 2018 in New York City. (Photo by Andrew Toth/Getty Images for New York Comic Con) /
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The Walking Dead started issue 1 after learning from Todd McFarlane.

Starting any project can be tough. And starting a comic book series like The Walking Dead can be an even bigger challenge. With the industry being so tough to get into and readers being very fickle, if a book doesn’t publish and grab readers early on, it probably won’t succeed.

This is something Robert Kirkman knew very well when starting this new zombie comic series. Interestingly enough, Kirkman went against his own comic preferences when releasing the first issue of The Walking Dead and it may have paid off in a big way.

According to the Cutting Room Floor section of The Walking Dead Deluxe issue 1, he was going back and forth between two different ways to start the issue…and chose the one he thought would perform better over the one he typically enjoys.

Here is what Kirkman had to say:

"“I had a conversation with Erik Larsen about how he always seemed to start a comic with a splash page, followed by a double-page spread. He mentioned how in his view, that got you into the story quicker, that by page 4 when you actually started reading panels, you were already invested. Up until that point, that was how I liked to tell stories, too.”"

Of course, Erik Larsen is best known as an artist, writer, and publisher for Marvel who found major success with Spider-Man in the early 1990s but left to join Image Comics. If Kirkman liked his style and the conversation with him was positive, why doesn’t Image’s The Walking Dead issue 1 comic start that way?

Well, that’s because Kirkman realized something else after Larsen pointed it out.

"“He pointed out, in contrast, that Todd McFarlane preferred to start his stories with a ton of words. Most of his page 1s were very dense and covered with a ton of dialogue or captions. Todd’s thinking was that he wanted people to feel like they had gotten their money’s worth by Page 2. I’d always considered Todd’s first pages a steep barrier of entry, and how I found it kind of off-putting. Erik laughed and agreed, but added ‘Todd’s work has always outsold mine.'”"

Perhaps this is why there is no big splash page or spread to start out The Walking Dead comics. instead, a page with action and dialogue kicks off the story explaining why Rick Grimes is in the hospital. The second page is the splash page, showing Rick in his hospital bed when he woke from his coma.

Robert Kirkman’s approach to the comic seems to have been successful. Issue 1 of The Walking Dead not only set the comic book world on fire but hooked many readers who stuck by the series throughout its 15-year run that included 193 total issues. It turns out that Todd McFarlane guy might know what he’s doing with comic books.

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