The Walking Dead's Rick Grimes looking at zombies from the comic series.

For over twenty years, readers have been clamoring to know what caused the zombie outbreak in The Walking Dead comic series – but repeatedly during the series’ run, and to this day, Robert Kirkman has stressed the fact that the lack of an answer is an important part of the story’s success.

In an old interview with IGN from early in The Walking Dead’s run, Kirkman confirmed that, up to that point, he had zero interest in establishing a definitive cause of the zombie uprising. The author held to this standard up through the end of the series, but even still, it is one of the foremost questions that fans still ask about the book.

Comic book art: Zombie horde in full color, from The Walking Dead Deluxe

However, there are several valid creative reasons Robert Kirkman cited as far back as 2007, and at many other points throughout The Walking Dead’s run, that it makes sense to leave this plot point unrevealed.

Despite Its Zombie-Horror Premise, Robert Kirkman Strove For A Sense Of “Realism” In His Story

The Walking Dead’s Literary Genre, Re-Examined

The quick, easy answer to the question “what is The Walking Dead about?” is “zombies” – but anyone who has invested time in the franchise, either as a viewer of the TV series, or especially as a reader of Robert Kirkman’s original comic book, knows that it is really about its human characters’ reactions to a truly nightmarish end-of-the-world scenario. Zombies are a narrative mechanism, used to push the characters to their absolute limits. As Kirkman explained to IGN back in 2007:

If you take away the zombies from the Walking Dead, it’s really just an accessible story about people’s lives in an extreme situation.

As the author explained, this was key to his decision to withhold an explanation for the zombie outbreak.

Kirkman elaborated further:

I feel that if you were to sit down and say, you know, a space spore landed on Earth and infected a bunch of people…There’s no explanation for the zombies that doesn’t push you further into the realm of science fiction, and I feel like it would kind of kill the believability, as odd as that sounds for a book about a bunch of dead people walking around.

This is an interesting moment to unpack, because it essentially amounts to The Walking Dead’s creator offering an apologia – that is, a defense – for his story’s non-real elements, while trying to emphasize that the realism of the story is more vital than its sci-fi or fantasy elements. Still, it is not unwarranted, as for many audience members, the zombie premise of the series immediately relegates it to a lower status than other “realist” fiction, and here, Kirkman hoped to make readers rethink that.

Zombies Get All The Attention When It Comes To “The Walking Dead,” But The Franchise Has Never Been “About” Them

Come For The Undead, Stay For The Living

Zombies from The Walking Dead.

What is and is not literary realism is an elusive question, but Walking Dead author Robert Kirkman rightfully points out that the realist elements of his series are what makes it one of the great franchises of the 21st century so far. The zombies are a hook, which gets fans to check out the comics, or the shows, but what keeps them engaged are the characters, and the realistic drama of their response to the traumatic conditions they have been thrust into.

Because of his focus on characters, rather than lore, and his restriction to a limited set of characters, without revealing too much about the story’s wider world, Kirkman made revealing The Walking Dead comic’s zombie outbreak origin unnecessary.

The TV adaptation of The Walking Dead notably diverged from Robert Kirkman by revealing the source of its zombie outbreak, but as the creator of the franchise explained as early as 2007, he didn’t want to risk “what the book [had] going for it” by satisfying readers’ desire to know more about the outbreak. Ultimately, because of his focus on characters, rather than lore, and his restriction to a limited set of characters, without revealing too much about the story’s wider world, Kirkman made revealing The Walking Dead comic’s zombie outbreak origin unnecessary.