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Although zombies were popular throughout the late 2000s and 2010s, they were seen as largely played out when comic writer Robert Kirkman pitched “The Walking Dead.” It was the early 2000s and the groundbreaking “28 Days Later”<\/a> hadn’t even been released in the United States. So, when Kirkman approached the comic publishing company Image with an idea for a black-and-white zombie series, it hesitated.<\/p>\n “When I pitched ‘The Walking Dead’ to Image, Jim Valentino and Eric Stephenson were running the company, and they both felt that ‘The Walking Dead’ as a straight zombie book didn’t have enough of a hook to it,” Kirkman explained in a 2007 IGN interview<\/a>. It may seem silly in hindsight, but the elevator pitch for “The Walking Dead” is indeed sort of basic: It’s a standard story about a group of survivors in a zombie apocalypse, with the main thing distinguishing it being its sheer longevity. “The Walking Dead” thrives because it lets its characters slowly evolve over the years, but that feature doesn’t immediately stand out in the comics’ first issue.<\/p>\n Kirkman’s solution to this problem was to do a little of what he called “kind of fibbing” with the publishers. He told them that “The Walking Dead” wouldn’t merely be a zombie story, but a zombie versus aliens narrative. As he explained:<\/p>\n “I had done a few books with them, so I felt comfortable doing this \u2014 I basically just lied to them and said, ‘Well look, this is how it’s going to be: The whole book is going to be as I pitched it, but as the issues progress, eventually I’m going to reveal that it was actually aliens who caused the zombie uprising. And it’s going to be leading to this big battle between the humans and the aliens, and the aliens did this to kind of weaken the humans’ military forces, and eventually it’s going to be this big alien invasion.’ And so they said, ‘Oh yeah, that sounds sweet! Let’s do that.’ And so they approved the book based on that.”<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n