Robert Kirkman Talks "The Walking Dead" Side Stories

I'm hesistant to call these "prequels", since they don't really go back to a time before the story but instead give us parallel events during the time of the main stories in the comics. Anyway, Entertainment Weekly talked with Kirkman about the series of novels coming out that are giving us some more insight into the world of zombies, beginning with The Governor. And here is an except from that interview:

I appreciate the Governor is one of the major villains of the Walking Dead universe. But there were times while reading The Road to Woodbury when I felt kind of sorry for him. Yes, he feeds people’s entrails to his pet zombie. But mostly he just wants people to get along! 

One of the things that interests me the most about the Walking Dead is that we here in this world read these stories and we go, “Okay, this person’s evil, this person is doing bad things, this person is clearly a villain.” But when you try to empathize with what these people are living for, what they’re going through, and how their world view is changing… look, many of the things that the Governor does are indefensible and basically evil. But, for the most part, the majority of the decisions he’s making and the actions he’s taking are the kind of things that you would have to do to be a leader in this world. That’s a little terrifying and it’s supposed to be a little uncomfortable but, you know, there’s definitely a lot of grey areas going on in this guy’s life. 

How much, if at all, did you mentally develop the back story of the Governor when you were originally writing the character for the comic book series? 

Well, I don’t want to reveal the twist in the first novel — but that is a somewhat new revelation. There were little snippets and little notes that I kept in mind when I was writing the comic book that I am expanding and twisting and turning as we work on this novel series. I’m very meticulous in working with Jay that every single thing which happens in this novel series is completely canon and dovetails into what you already know in the comic books perfectly. But, yeah, there is some actual writing going on! I’m not just going off of notes I wrote 10 years ago.