Leading up to The Overstreet Comic Book Price Guide #50 release, Gemstone Publishing will commemorate the milestone by diving into the publication’s rich history. Over the Guide’s five decades in print, thousands upon thousands of comic books have been priced, the market has been meticulously studied, and creators, characters, and publishing houses have been featured with detailed coverage. With the 50th edition comes time to revisit how comic values have steadily (sometimes astronomically) risen over the years and reflect on contributions made in crafting the Guide.

Along with studying the value of thousands of comic books, the Guide has also provided context on those comics, characters, and publishers. In the 43rd edition, the Guide studied one of its more recent additions that had gained immense popularity among comic readers and a larger TV audience: The Walking Dead. Here, we present that article as written by J.C. Vaughn, Gemstone’s Vice-President of Publishing:

“An epidemic of apocalyptic proportions has swept the globe, causing the dead to rise and feed on the living. In a matter of months, society has crumbled: There is no government, no grocery stores, no mail delivery, no cable TV. Rick Grimes finds himself one of the few survivors in this terrifying future. A couple months ago he was a small town cop who had never fired a shot and only ever saw one dead body. Separated from his family, he must now sort through all the death and confusion to try and find his wife and son. In a world ruled by the dead, we are forced to finally begin living.”

— Image Comics solicitation text

Zombie comics have been around almost as long as zombie movies. Unlike vampires, the Frankenstein monster and several other horror regulars that most fans would think of as perennials, zombies had for decades been a trend or fad that came and went, like werewolves and mummies.

Of course what we call zombies now were traditionally called ghouls. The difference between them was that zombies unconsciously did the bidding of a live, human master, while ghouls were flesh eaters. Director George Romero blurred – and basically obliterated – those distinctions with his 1968 film Night of the Living Dead. From that point on, discussions in film (and subsequently comics) morphed until “zombies” became a synonym for “ghouls” and the traditional meaning of zombies, at least in terms of pop culture, went dormant.

Robert Kirkman’s first published comic book came in 2000 in Battle Pope, which he co-created with artist Tony Moore and published himself under his Funk-O-Tron imprint. He teamed with artist Cory Walker for a Superpatriot miniseries for Erik Larsen at Image Comics in 2002, and in 2003 he and Walker launched Invincible at Image (Walker eventually dropped out and was replaced by Ryan Ottley).

A short while later that same year, Kirkman and Moore launched The Walking Dead, also at Image. Moore left the interior art duties after The Walking Dead #6, replaced by Charlie Adlard (The X-Files), although he continued on covers through #24. As a black and white comic, it was not launched into a highly receptive environment.

With the exceptions of Jeff Smith’s Bone and Terry Moore’s Strangers in Paradise, the marketplace had not been kind to too many black and white comics since the explosion and subsequent implosion of B&W titles in the 1980s fueled in large part by the initial success of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. There certainly have been a few anomalies, but pause for a moment and name the big successes…

For the most part, very few names come up.

It’s not like The Walking Dead immediately set the market on fire, though, or suddenly began to dominate Kirkman’s career at that point.

Invincible attracted Hollywood’s attention, with Kirkman himself hired to write the screenplay. He also began writing for Marvel, including prolific work on Captain America, Jubilee, Ultimate X-Men, and Marvel Team-Up, among others, and he also kept creating new titles of his own.

His output included The Astounding Wolf-Man (2007) with artist Jason Howard, which like many of his other works was published by Image Comics. Originally founded by Erik Larsen, Jim Lee, Rob Liefeld, Todd McFarlane, Whilce Portacio, Marc Silvestri, and Jim Valentino in 1992, through the success of his creations Kirkman became the first Image partner known primarily as a writer and the first new partner after the original founders (Portacio dropped out early in the process, Liefeld had a falling out with the other partners and left, and Lee eventually sold his studio to DC Comics, where he is now Co-Publisher).

McFarlane and Kirkman co-created Haunt (2009) and with Silvestri he co-created five properties for Top Cow Productions “Pilot Season” (2009-2010). He also wrote the ill-fated (or at least very, very delayed) Image United crossover.

While many of his successes were big in comic book terms, nothing matched the attention his work received following the launch of AMC TV’s The Walking Dead in 2010. The comics were already perennial sellers in multiple formats by that point, but the impact of the TV series added fuel to the fire.    

With Kirkman himself one of the series’ writer-producers, the television incarnation kept basic plot and perhaps more importantly the feel of the comic while make substantial changes to the timing of some of the plot elements and to some of the characters. While debated among fans, sometimes hotly, the changes did not substantially create any schism in between the comic and the show in terms of tone.

Now Kirkman is guiding an empire of single-issue comic books, collected edition softcovers and hardcovers, board games, novels, a video game and a television series. And it’s not just any TV series, it’s a cable show that is so groundbreaking in its ratings performance than it regularly beats out the competition on the broadcast channels.

“When a show about the walking dead on basic cable beats every network show in the ratings demographic that advertisers care most about, you have to wonder who the real zombies are,” wrote David Carr for The New York Times.

“A zombie, after all, is something that continues to roam, and tries to devour all in its path even though its natural life is over – a description that does not sound that far-fetched when it comes to broadcast networks,” he wrote.

“During its run last fall, The Walking Dead was the highest-rated show among viewers 18 to 49, the most-sought age group, with a bigger audience than network winners like The Big Bang Theory, American Idol, The Voice and Modern Family,” he wrote.

The early issues of The Walking Dead – particularly #1, #7 (first appearance of Tyreese), #19 (first Michonne), #27 (The Governor) – continue to command premium prices, and the early issues of the series continue to perform well above their peers of the same era.

Kirkman continues to create or co-create other properties, with Thief Of Thieves, Super Dinosaur, and other titles coming out from his Skybound imprint at Image Comics.