Robert Kirkman Discusses His Upcoming Comic Project THIEF OF THIEVES

In a recent interview with Entertainment Weekly, Kirkman discussed the upcoming project stating that the comic, which will release its first issue on February 8, is “going to be very grounded in the real world,” he continues, “no zombies, no space aliens, no superheroes. It’s just going to be real human characters doing somewhat horrible things to each other.”

The story will follow a professional thief by the name of Conrad Paulson, Kirkman goes on to explain a little about the character, “He is one of the greatest thieves who’s ever lived, but he’s gotten to a point in his life where he realizes that he’s chosen his professional life over his family life and greatly regrets that. He’s got an adult son who is kind of following in his footsteps but doing a horrible job, and he has an estranged wife that he is still very much in love with. Our story picks up when he is trying to turn his back on his profession and rekindle his relationship with his wife and trying to fix his son’s horrible predicament.”

The Walking Dead creator also mentioned that his time in the writer's room while working on the AMC series is what motivated him to do this new series differently than he's use to. “I’ve been spending a lot of time in writers’ rooms since the very first season of the Walking Dead and I’ve been somewhat enchanted by the process. It’s a very cool thing to have writers working hard to improve a story together as a group. It’s not something that usually happens in comics. So I got the idea to do the series that way, to have an overall story and then get a sort of writers’ room of people together to help map out what’s going on with the characters and tighten the story up here and there. It’s kind of a cool little experiment.”

Nick Spencer, who will be collaborating on the series, wrote the first six issues following Kirkman's “initial series outline” and the conversations the two have shared. After the initial six issues, the different arcs will then be rotated among the various writers involved with the project.

When asked why he chose to work on a more grounded, non-fantasy series Kirkman responded, “Moving forward with my career, I think I will do more grounded, realistic stuff. I’ve had a lot of fun doing big science-fiction action in things like The Infinite and cool fun kids stuff in Super Dinosaur and superhero stuff like Invincible. But Thief of Thieves and some of the other things I’m developing are a little bit more grounded and a little bit more “real world,” somewhat more consistent with what I’ve done with the Walking Dead. It’s odd, but I think the Walking Dead has been the most grounded, realistic thing that I’ve done thus far. I think I’m going to do more stuff like that moving forward.”