Entertainment

'Fear The Walking Dead' Is Its Own Story

by Rachel Paige

For everyone who can't wait until The Walking Dead returns in October, AMC is here to help you out with that. On Sunday night, the network will premiere its spinoff series, Fear The Walking Dead, which is going to take fans back to the beginning of the zombie apocalypse — haven't we always wanted to know how this whole thing started, anyway? But there's another, less morbid question on my mind about the spinoff. Like the original show, will Fear The Walking Dead be based on comics? It could be. If there were any prequel Walking Dead comics, that is.

The Walking Dead is based on the comic series of the same name by Robert Kirkman, who also serves as a writer and executive producer for the OG series and Fear The Walking Dead. The main TV show follows those comics and though it has strayed from the material, everything aligns pretty closely. So fans who have checked out the comics usually have a pretty good idea as to where the TV action is heading. There are still surprises in there, of course. But even Game of Thrones doesn't directly follow the source material anymore.

For those reasons, it would be great if Fear the Walking Dead were to follow the comics, too, except that there aren't any prequel Walking Dead comics. Kirkman has never written any sort of "prequel" or introductory story as to how this whole zombie apocalypse got started in the first place, or followed a different set of characters the way Fear The Walking Dead will. The events of The Walking Dead simply pick up well into the outbreak, and our characters continue on from there.

However, in a kind of roundabout way, Fear the Walking Dead does still have that comic origin, if only because it's a spinoff series based on a series based on some comics. Make sense? Everything's all tied together. And just because there aren't comics for Fear the Walking Dead now, doesn't mean there never will be. The spinoff could get its own treatment someday, maybe as an expanded story, or even an origin-origin story for it (if there is such a thing).

The benefit about not having comics for Fear the Walking Dead is that everything is going to be a complete surprise. We have literally no idea what's going to happen. Well, we know what eventually will happen in the end with the major zombie outbreak and state of the world that we've seen in The Walking Dead, but how these new characters get there is still anyone's guess.

Images: AMC; Giphy