The WALKING DEAD creator has spoken up about the series’ upcoming sophomore year, raising the zombie bar, the WALKING DEAD video game and discussing the possibilities for third and fourth seasons with showrunner Fank Darabont.

The AMC program’s hugely successful first year featured some exceptional (and graphic) zombie kills, and Kirkman promises that the bar won’t simply be raised in season two. “You can’t even see the bar because it’s been raised so much,” says Kirkman in his chat with Collider. “There’s all kinds of crazy stuff that is coming up. I’m really excited. It really becomes just an effort to just find that thing that AMC is going to make us change. So we all are sitting there going, ‘Oh, they are going to make us change that!’ There is a lot of cool stuff coming up.

“I worry that we are getting a little too like, ‘Oh, yeah. They [AMC] will let us do anything,’ just because they have been so accommodating. It’s really kind of shocking, but I think it’s a testament to how successful the show has been that they have been willing go to that extra mile. They are allowing a zombie show to be a zombie show. They are not pulling punches at all, and I think that is a big part of its success. People who like zombie movies can sit down and watch this, and not feel like they are getting a light version of a zombie movie. We plan to stretch those boundaries to the test on the second season.”

In addition to the comic and TV series, a WALKING DEAD video game is currently being developed. “I just had a meeting with them yesterday,” Kirkman notes. “I’m not writing the video game myself just because I don’t have time. I can say that I picked Frank Darabont for the show and I picked Telltale Games because they are very familiar with the comic book and they know what makes the comic book good and what makes the comic book THE WALKING DEAD as opposed to just, you know, zombies running around and cutting people’s heads off and stuff. If you want to buy a game where you run around and kill zombies with an Uzi—that game exists and there are more of those games coming out. They are fun games and everybody likes them, but we are not going to try and compete with those games. We are going to try to do something a little different that is a little more true to THE WALKING DEAD.”

Kirkman wrote a WALKING DEAD episode for the first season, and has plans to write more for the next. “We are still working that out,” he remarks. “It will probably be more than one.” Season two will also have a new contributor: Stephen King is supposedly set to pen an episode this year (click here to read that item).

Thinking longterm, Kirkman and Darabont aren’t only looking to the second season, but beyond. “There are different ideas that Frank had for different episodes from the beginning of the first season,” Kirkman comments. “He has ideas for the third season. We talk about the third and fourth season a lot in the writers’ room, which haven’t been picked up by AMC, but we have high hopes. So there is a lot of longterm planning. Anything that we couldn’t quite fit into the first season will just kind of happen in the [second] season.”

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