Robert Kirkman

Robert Kirkman was born on November 30, 1978, in Lexington, Kentucky, and grew up in Cynthiana, a small town in the same state. A comics reader from early on, he did not wait for a big publisher to call: he decided to put out his own books. He lived in Kentucky until 2011, when he moved to Los Angeles with one foot already planted in television.

His first work was Battle Pope in 2000, a superhero parody created with artist Tony Moore and released through the indie label Funk-O-Tron. The humor was over the top and the print run small, but the book opened doors at Image Comics and cemented his partnership with Moore. In 2008 Battle Pope became an eight-episode animated web series for Spike's website.

In 2003 came the two titles that changed everything. With Cory Walker he created Invincible for Image's superhero line: the story of Mark Grayson, son of Earth's most powerful hero, finding his own powers as a teenager. Walker could not keep up with the monthly schedule, and Ryan Ottley took over the art. That same year, with Tony Moore, he launched The Walking Dead, in black and white, about police officer Rick Grimes waking up in a hospital after the dead have started to walk. Charlie Adlard took over the art from issue 7, and Moore stayed on covers through issue 24.

The pitch for The Walking Dead was simple and bold: a zombie movie that never ends. Kirkman wanted to follow the survivors for years and show that living together and making moral calls weigh as much as the undead do. The series won the Eisner for Best Continuing Series in 2010 and ended in 2019 with issue 193, with no advance warning to readers. During that stretch he also wrote for Marvel, including Marvel Zombies, two years of Ultimate X-Men and the Irredeemable Ant-Man miniseries.

In July 2008 Kirkman became a partner at Image Comics, the only one of its five partners who was not a co-founder. In 2010 he co-founded Skybound Entertainment, the company that handles comics, TV and film for his creations, including the licenses for The Walking Dead and Invincible. That same year AMC premiered The Walking Dead series, with Kirkman as a producer. Its success led to spinoffs like Fear the Walking Dead and, later, to the animated Invincible on Prime Video, which debuted in 2021.

He kept making creator-owned books: Outcast, with Paul Azaceta, about a man haunted by demonic possessions since childhood, which ran from 2014 to 2021 and was adapted by Cinemax; Oblivion Song, from 2018 to 2022; and Fire Power, from 2020 to 2024. In 2012 his collaborator Tony Moore sued him over rights to The Walking Dead, and the two settled that same year. Today Kirkman still runs Skybound, overseeing its adaptations and new comics.