Warning: The following contains minor spoilers for season five of "The Walking Dead"
Despite all of the rotting corpses and hordes of flesh-eating zombies, AMC's hit show "The Walking Dead" has never forgotten its birth place. Comic creator Robert Kirkman is on the show's staff and has offered some helpful guidance as the series navigates his long and complex source material.
Through five seasons, "The Walking Dead" has taken some creative liberties with pacing and character deaths, but has maintained reasonable continuity with the original comics. The upcoming sixth season, though, will do more to connect the show and the comic than ever before.
Current "Walking Dead" showrunner Scott M. Gimple told EW that the next season will fill in details that Kirkman and artist Charlie Adlard left out of the comic. At roughly this point in the source material, Kirkman jumped forward a few years to explore a rebuilt version of the Alexandria community. Gimple explains that audiences will be able to see those developments more clearly.
"I think there's a really cool aspect to the first half of the season that serves almost as a prequel to some direct comic stuff in the second half of the season," Gimple said. "I think there's a way that Robert did some of the story that we're reaching that had a real past to it, where people are referring to some things in the past in the comic. And we're able to portray some of that backstory in some ways that you didn't get to see in the comic."
When last we saw our merry band of zombie killers, things were not exactly alright. Noah had been killed, Rick had gone off the deep end, and the abusive husband Pete had to be killed right in front of the newly arrived Morgan. Clearly, there are some serious issues season six will have to address.
But it will be interesting for both comic readers and show watchers to see how this militarized version of Alexandria will spring up under Rick's leadership and how the two groups will attempt to continue to coexist.
"The Walking Dead" season six is expected to debut in October.
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