The origin of the rise of the zombies has always been a mystery in the lore of The Walking Dead . Many fans hoped that it would end up being explained at some point in the comics, but it’s been almost a year since the last issue of the comic was published and they never explained that long-awaited fact to us. The publisher has even announced that it would reprint the entire saga in color, which means between the lines that we can only know the origin through the television series , which continues its course. Luckily, there are very impatient fans, capable of asking the question directly to the author of the work. And now we do know the answer. How were zombies born on The Walking Dead? Stay and we will tell you in great detail.
The Walking Dead , the origin of zombie fever
The Walking Dead has undoubtedly been one of the great phenomena of the last decade . The story of zombies started on TV through the American channel AMC more than 10 years ago – yes, its first episode aired on October 31, 2010 – although prior to this discovery on the small screen, the plot was already famous in the world of comics and known to many avid readers of this format.
Its creator, Robert Kirkman , started in 2003 a series of monthly comics , drawn by Tony Moore and Charlie Adlard, in which he told us the life of Rick Grimes , a deputy sheriff who is injured in a shooting and ends up in a state of eat. Upon awakening, he discovers that the world has been ravaged in some kind of zombie apocalypse and that he does not know where his family is.
From there he will start a long odyssey in his search while trying to survive the attacks of the so-called “walkers”. And the funny thing about The Walking Dead universe is that they never use the word ‘zombie’, since they live in a parallel universe in which that concept of the undead has never existed in popular culture.
End of an Era: Goodbye to The Walking Dead Comics
With all the heartache, Robert Kirkman suddenly announced in the introduction to Issue # 193 (released July 3, 2019) that this would be the last comic in the series. He argued that he had run out of ideas to keep the story going, and had actually originally planned to finish the Rick Grimes story arc when it came to the Commonwealth community. This happened in # 150, which seemed premature to the author, but at the same time without too many weft ends to tie.
In July 2020, Image Comics announced that they would be publishing a full-color edition of The Walking Dead with colorist Dave McCaig. The first volume of the edition was published on October 7, 2020, with the rest of the comics going on sale every two weeks from November 2020 onwards.
Has The Walking Dead series finished yet?
The TV series The Walking Dead still has a lot to tell. Right now the series is going through season 11 . And is that due to delays produced by the pandemic, the series could not have its premiere in October 2020 (as is tradition), but premiered in the US on August 23, 2021. Episode eight was broadcast in October 2021, and the 24-episode season will be broadcast over two years. Meanwhile, they have already announced the spin-off of Daryl and Carol for 2023 .
With such uncertainty in the air, what we can hope is that, as has happened in the comic, the television series does not answer the great million-dollar question : what made the population turn into a zombie. Luckily, its creator has just put us out of doubt …
The zombie origin comes from afar
It all started with a question on social networks . Twitter user @ Lbiddle25 wrote directly to comic book creator Robert Kirkman on Twitter, claiming that he had finished reading the comics and still did not know what caused so many of the humans to become the undead.
Hey @RobertKirkman , so we never got an answer even with the comic finished, what caused the zombies?
– 80’s Carl Weathers (@ Lbiddle25) January 22, 2020
Kirkman’s response was immediate, and probably the solution has left many more doubts, or at least confusion, among those who wanted an answer . And it is that Kirkman has ensured that the origin of the zombies is due to a ‘space spore’ . Is a spore from space the cause that much of humanity has turned zombie? If this is not the end (or the beginning of everything) that you were waiting to read, it may be because you do not understand anything. It is true that within the atmosphere of The Walking Dead , introducing the term space spore does not fit the story at all, but everything has a reason.
Space spore.
– Robert Kirkman (@RobertKirkman) January 22, 2020
Robert Kirkman’s Space Spores
Is Robert Kirkman trolling us? Is it a deus ex machina to blame it on outer space? As implausible as it may sound, this theory is many years old .
And it is that just before Kirkman and Tony Moore released the original The Walking Dead , they were testing with a continuation of the mythical Night of the Living Dead , the famous 1968 film directed by George A. Romero. In this film, it is explained that a satellite that was doing tests on Venus has suffered an accident and the resulting radiation is causing the infection of humans .
The origin of zombies in other works of fiction
If Robert Kirkman was inspired by the films of George A. Romero, the film director was inspired by I Am Leyenda , the novel by Richard Matheson published in 1954.
Although the eponymous film starring Will Smith has reached us more, in which humanity mutates due to a genetically modified measles virus to cure cancer – if something like this happened today, many would blame Bill Gates without hesitation twice-. In the original novel, vampirism has a bacterial origin .
And it is that Robert Neville, the protagonist, discovers Bacillus Vampiris , a very contagious bacterium, although weak in the face of solar radiation and garlic. That explains the contagion by infection while they are alive, and their resurrection after death.
The most recent example we have of fungus-infected zombies is found in The Last of Us video game. It occurs after a mutation of the Cordyceps fungus, which affects the brain and spreads in the shape of a mushroom throughout the host’s face and body.
In other works of this niche genre, the origin is viral. This is the case of 28 Days Later , a 2002 film in which the pandemic is caused by the release of laboratory animals with which they were experimenting with a mutant virus that causes aggressiveness and violence. The infection is from a bite or contact with blood from an infected person. Unlike other works, once the host body dies, it is not resurrected.
Another interesting form of contagion occurs in the Danish Netflix series The Rain , where the deadly virus is transmitted through water . In this zombie universe, it is essential to avoid rain and any stagnant water. What’s more, stepping into a puddle with a poorly insulated boot is a death sentence.
Does Robert Kirkman’s explanation make sense?
The truth is no. Although that doesn’t matter much, because in The Walking Dead universe, most of the scientists who could solve the dilemma have passed away . And it is that Max Brooks himself, author of Zombie: Survival Guide, warns that the main sources of this type of zombie outbreaks would accumulate in hospitals and laboratories . If civilization has fallen enough that there is no central government or military body left, it is almost impossible to maintain a research platform.
Throughout the television series we meet few doctors. The first is Dr. Edwin Jenner , the last surviving physician at the Atlanta Center for Disease Control, where the group travels in hopes that they have a cure. He himself admits sadly that he has no means, and his wife, the really brilliant scientist capable of finding a solution, had been infected . As a last resort they had monitored his constants to study the stages of death and resurrection.
Before blowing up the CCE, the doctor whispers something in Rick’s ear. We didn’t discover the secret until the second season, where he confesses that he knew everyone was infected . As clichéd as The Walking Dead is , getting infected in any way other than by bite or injury was quite a novel plot twist. And is that The Walking Dead taught us what it was to be an asymptomatic carrier before it was mainstream .
Throughout the seasons, we meet doctors like the Carson brothers and Denise, who end up dying in the guerrillas against the Saviors. And it is that in The Walking Dead the truly dangerous are the living, not the walkers. With a lack of resources and specialized personnel, humanity has suffered a brutal technological setback. In fact, in the final issue # 193, which happens 25 years after # 192, they are rebuilding railroad tracks to connect the East and West coasts of the old USA…. Come on, as if they were back in the nineteenth century.
Conclusions on the origin
Kirkman simply wanted to pay tribute to what was his inspiration , and although you think that the television series differs in some respects from the comic, it could also take into account the origin of the zombies if we take into account some details, such as the soundtrack. And it is that among the songs that we can find in season 1, we can listen to a call Space Junk (Space junk). Isn’t that fantastic?
Interestingly, the tweet was deleted shortly after it was posted and is no longer available on Kirkman’s timeline today. The creator already stated a few years ago in an interview that he did not see the point in explaining the origin because this would not change the lives of its protagonists at all. Still, the fact that he deleted the tweet may indicate that perhaps the television series will dare to dip its foot into the mud.
It is true that explaining something like this at this point in the film could be quite strange (remember that they are in the final season), so it is also likely that many prefer to leave things as they are and continue with the current plot. Looking for a cure? That is another sing.
