All About The Dixon: Robert Kirkman On Daryl In The Comics

One of the most interesting, and occasionally infuriating, things about the AMC television version of The Walking Dead is how it had followed certain plot arcs from the original comic book, while in others it wildly deviates from those books. For example, Rick’s crew met The Governor in the original comics, but he sure as hell didn’t have a second act after Michonne got through with him (nor a second kidney, and the less said about his testicles, the better), and unlike in the comics, Andrea is still wandering about picking off bad guys almost at will.

Those deviations started early in the first season of the show – in the comic, if Rick ever visited the Center For Disease Control, it was to get a nasty rash he crossed back over the Mexican border with looked at – and at the time, many of us just figured that someone made a conscious decision to make changes over a period of time. Maybe because of something original showrunner Frank Darabont decided, or because of the whim of some focus group-armed network suit.

Well, it turns out, based on a panel that The Walking Dead creator Robert Kirkman have at this past weekend’s Arizona Comic Con, the decision did come from a guy in a suit. That suit being mostly denim and leather. And that guy being Daryl Dixon.

We fans of the comic book know that, despite the raucous popularity of Daryl for the past four years on TV, he has never appeared in the comic series. And apparently that has been a conscious decision, meant to stimulate not only the TV show, but the comic as well:

I guess it wouldn’t be a bad thing if Daryl Dixon showed up in the comic. But I don’t know. I really like the separation. I like that when we sit down to write the show one of the first things we deal with is: “How does Daryl Dixon change this story?” Because we always start from: “Ok, we like this part of the comic. How are we going to do it?”

And it’s just always interesting to get in there and be like, “Oh, well his existence and the fact that his personality is this, and he would behave this way, means that he would react to this person differently than this and differently than that.” And it’s just really a great thing for the show that he doesn’t exist in the comic. And I really like that.

But yeah, I don’t know. It would be cool if he was in the comic, but I don’t really have any plans on doing that. But I guess he would be the one if I was going to pull any character from the show into the comic, it would be him. Mostly just because I love Norman [Reedus]. Handsome dude.

Handsome dude indeed… although – true story, swear to God – back in 1998 or so, I was walking down Newbury Street in Boston when they were shooting Boondock Saints and I walked right past Norman Reedus, and I totally had about six inches on the dude and could’ve taken him on weight alone, even before I was a bloated, middle-aged drunkard. But I digress.

I was actually excited to read this, because I kinda like having Daryl out of the comic book. Because let’s face it: Daryl is a near-superhero level character on the show, which could throw the whole dynamic of the comic out of whack. But further, knowing that Daryl’s existence in the TV universe, and the fact that the writers’ room uses Daryl to modify comic plot points for the show, gives me a lot of hope.

That hope being that, when we finally meet Negan on the TV show, we’ll see Daryl crossbow his face before the start of the third act, and it will feel like I got the last year and a half of my life back.

(via Blastr)