Anna Daniels
In the original Walking Dead comic series, small-town Georgia cop Rick Grimes awakens from a coma caused by a mundane gunshot wound to discover that, while he slept, society as he knew it had been dismantled by an invading horde of infectious zombies — “roamers,” in series parlance. Early on in the series, it’s revealed that every human in the world is already infected with the zombie pathogen; while zombie bites accelerate the transformation, any death eventually results in zombification. According to Kirkman, the cause of this pandemic is extraterrestrial in nature.
“Space spore,” Kirkman confirmed on Twitter when a fan asked how the zombie virus started.
Kirkman has long credited the work of the late horror movie director George A. Romero as a key inspiration for The Walking Dead. He’s said on numerous occasions that his entire magnum opus resulted from the supposition, “What if a zombie movie just kept going?” In light of this, the space spore explanation may be yet another homage to Romero — particularly his iconic zombie flick Night of the Living Dead, wherein the zombie apocalypse has potentially been instigated by radiation released from a space probe to Venus.
Fans weren’t sure they’d ever get a straight answer from Kirkman as to what started the zombie virus in The Walking Dead. As recently as 2018, in a Q&A on Tumblr, he dismissed the notion of revealing the source of the zombie contagion as irrelevant to the story he was telling. “Maybe years after it’s all over I’ll just casually mention it in an interview,” he said. “That seems like a very J.K. Rowling thing to do.” Shots fired! Fortunately for curious fans, it seems like Kirkman found his inner Rowling.
Written by: Looper
