Robert Kirkman's The Walking Dead Wishlist

Early on in The Walking Dead, the book’s protagonist, Rick Grimes, was travelling solo after awaking from a coma. He made his way into what used to be the hustling, bustling center of Atlanta to find out how much the world had changed around him...

Kirkman Wants to See:
“Rick shows up in Atlanta for the first time, riding a horse. He gets surrounded by zombies and both he and his horse are attacked...but the horse doesn’t make it. It’s going to be pretty intense.”

After meeting up with a band of survivors including his wife and son, Rick begins to organize the group. But in order to protect themselves, they decide that they need to get more weapons from zombie-infested Atlanta...

Kirkman Wants to See:
“When Rick and Glenn decide to go back to Atlanta for guns, Rick figures out that zombies may actually be using their sense of smell to differentiate between humans and other zombies – some of the zombies don’t have eyes and can’t see, but still only attack humans. So Rick and Glen hack up a dead zombie and rub pieces of the gore all over their clothes to mask their human flesh smell. Then they truck on into Atlanta covered in pieces of mangled flesh. It’s going to be a neat scene to see on television with what Greg Nicotero [special effects] does with all those pieces of meat.”

Though they need one another to survive, Rick’s group of survivors is not without its own internal tensions. The most prominent of these is between Rick and the man who used to be his best friend, Shane. While Rick was missing, Shane was the one who led the group, even developing a relationship with Rick’s wife, Lori...

Kirkman Wants to See:
“The confrontation between Shane and Rick - I’m really excited to see that transfer over to the small screen because I want to see how Andrew Lincoln [Rick Grimes] and Jon Bernthal [Shane] handle that scene. The way they develop their relationship is a little bit different in the show than how it is in the comic and I’m interested to see how those differences play out. There’s a lot of meaty stuff for the actors to go through there: It’s a cool emotional scene and I’d love to see Carl [Rick’s son] shoot that son of a bitch.”