'The Walking Dead' Creator Robert Kirkman Says He 'Exactly' Knows How The Comic Will Wrap Up, Skybound Entertainment Founder To Speak At 2015 South By Southwest Interactive Festival

ByChristian Saclao

Sep 09, 2014 08:21 PM EDT

While "The Walking Dead" creator Robert Kirkman cannot precisely tell how much longer the comic book will continue, he has recently revealed that he knows how exactly it will end.

"I do know what I'm building toward," Kirkman told Entertainment Weekly. "I don't know exactly what issue that's going to fall on, per se, and I do have a lot of road laid out before that that is going to take a long time, but I certainly know exactly what I'm building to."

Asked if he knows what would be the very last page of the comic book series, the 35-year-old Richmond, Kentucky-born writer responded, "Yeah."

"I think about a year or two ago. From the very beginning I would always plot these big, long overarching stories. So it'd be like, oh, they're going to get to the prison, then this is going to happen and then that's going to happen and that's going to happen," he explained. "I wouldn't really map out how many issues those were going to take, but I would always make sure that I had somewhere between two and ten years of story mapped out ahead of me."

"About a year or two ago, I finally nailed down exactly what I want the ending to be," revealed the comic book writer, whose notable works also include "Invincible," "Marvel Zombies" and "Ultimate X-Men."
"So now I've kind of got two trails of story going in my head. One working to where I'm at very far into the future, and one working from the end backwards. When those two stories meet, then I'll know exactly how long the story is. I'm rapidly approaching that point."

As for the TV adaptation, Kirkman and showrunner Scott M. Gimple are not in haste to wrap things up.

"Luckily, because of the comic book series, this isn't a show where we're going to run out of ideas," Kirkman told EW of the mega-hit AMC post-apocalyptic show. "This isn't a show where it's going to be, like, 'Well, they're clearly spinning their wheels just to keep the show going.' It's much more a matter of: Are we going to have enough seasons to get enough of the comic books into the show? I think that's more the struggle for us. That's what we're hoping to find out in the next few years."

Kirkman is expected to be a lot busier in the coming years if "The Walking Dead" companion show would be picked up to a full-pledge series. Just last Friday, Sept. 5, AMC announced that it ordered a pilot episode of the project, according to The Hollywood Reporter.

And just this Monday, Sept. 8, it was announced that Kirkman is one of featured speakers at the 2015 the South By Southwest (SXSW) Interactive Festival, Comicbook reported. He will be speaking at SXSW Gaming. The Interactive part of the festival runs from March 13-17, 2015.