What’s next for The Walking Dead?

For those of you who aren’t up to date with the latest episodes of the TV show or the latest issues of the comic book series: spoiler alert!!

If you have been keeping up with the latest developments: please keep reading 😉

I’ve been a fan of TWD for a long time. I started out with the first compendium and finished that in a couple of days. After that I started collection the trades, but when I was al caught up and didn’t want to wait for the next one to come out anymore, I had it put on my pull list at the comic book store and I’ve been reading the monthly comics ever since and picked up issue #185 last friday.

So as a long time reader, you can imagine that I was pretty exited when they announced the TV show. And I’ve been a fan of that show as well, ever since the first episode aired. Of course the TWD “universe” expanded even further as time went on. I read the first two novels, but I never made it through the third one. And I watched the first two seasons of Fear The Walking Dead, read the official magazine, watched Talking Dead and even gave the Telltale games a try, but none of those really stuck with me. To me, The Walking Dead is still the story of the core group, lead by Rick Grimes, in both the comic and the TV show. But now things have changed.

The comic book came first, of course, and had been running very succesfully for several years, before it was adapted as a TV show. And even though the big picture was largely the same and they took the main storylines from the comic, the TV show was always slightly different. Some characters lived longer or shorter and some characters, like Daryl for instance, never appeared in the comic and were exclusive to the TV show. I really liked this, because it still kept things exciting, even if you had read the comic books. But like I said, the big picture was largely the same until now.

The differences were always around. Shane died a lot earlier in the comic, Andrea lived a lot longer, Carol already died when they were in the prison and so on. These were all pretty important characters, but the main character was still Rick Grimes. Both in the comic book and the TV show. And now Andrew Lincoln has left the show and all the other survivors think Rick is dead. Of course we all saw him fly off in a helicopter, but apparently he’s not returning to the show. Or at least not any time soon. I’ve read that Andrew (and Rick) will be returning in future TWD movies, but we’ll have to see about that.

I’ve also read that Lauren Cohan, who plays Maggie, will be leaving the show as well this season. And with Chandler Riggs, who played Carl, leaving last season, that will mean some serious changes in the cast. Especially since all three characters are still very much alive in the comic book and are still playing very big roles there. That means that the show and comic will become more different from each other from now on. And that could actually be a good thing!

I thought it was cool that the show made the same time jump that the comic did some time ago. And I loved that the Whisperers appeared in the show this week. That’s another major story line from the comic that they will be adapting, so I’m excited to see how that will turn out. And seeing Judith as a kid and interacting with Neegan was also nice. In the comic, she died in the prison when she was still a baby, so it appears she will be kind of taking Carl’s place on the show. But it still felt a little weird to not have Rick around anymore.

My guess is that they will be pushing Daryl to the forefront now. He’s like their ace in the hole. He never appeared in the comic and is very popular among fans. So it makes sense that he will become the lead star of the show now. Will that work out? I guess we’ll just have to wait and see. Daryl was never much of a talker and I don’t know of he’ll ever be a true leader like Rick was, but it’ll sure be interesting to watch.

As long as they’ll keep adapting great stories from the comic, it will be fun to see how a different group of characters, with a different leader, will react to certain situations and “villains”. I’ll keep watching (and reading!!) anyway and I hope both formats will continue for a long time to come.