Warning for spoilers for Solid Blood #17 below!
The Walking Dead comic series ended well over a year, yet series co-creator Robert Kirkman just created an alternate reality in a comic where the series wasn't a runaway success. In that reality, Michonne never got the chance to appear in The Walking Dead, so she appeared in a different series, Solid Blood - where she was just brutally killed.
Kirkman and artist Ryan Ottley dropped a surprise new comic this week called Solid Blood - that went to comic shops that had orders placed for Kirkman's other series, Fire Power. Bizarrely, the book starts at issue #17, and inside the comic, it's written like it's from an alternate reality where The Walking Dead wasn't a success. Kirkman said in a YouTube video he had no idea where the comic came from and it was the most confusing book he'd ever seen - which is all part of his bizarre and frankly, incredible marketing of the surprise release.
The action in the comic opens with a character called the Necromonger killed Michonne (codenamed Swordmaster), seemingly with her own blade. The skull-faced bad guy says his undead army is ready to rain down on the remaining heroes in masse. The story isn't important - it's basically a bloody battle and the heroes - Shawna (who's Swordmaster's daughter) and Bladesmith make it out alive. In the letters of the book, Kirkman said he intended to kill Michonne in order to progress her daughter's story.
In the letter page, Kirkman talks about how Solid Blood was the first series of his to reach 25-issues (sorry Invincible), and that he included a character called Michonne in the book after she was supposed to appear in a series called Dead Planet and then in The Walking Dead before it ended up not hitting 15 issues. So, in this alternate reality, she became one of the heroes of Solid Blood, where she would meet her end at the hands of the Necromonger. Confused, yet?
Clearly, it's a fun bit of marketing for Kirkman to just release a book that's supposedly from an alternate reality where his career shaped out much differently. He makes Michonne one of the heroes of the story, before, as he tends to do, surprisingly killing her off in "issue 17" (which is actually issue #1 to readers). Released only physically in comic stores, Solid Blood won't make a ton of sense unless you get a chance to read it - but regardless, it's great to see Kirkman and Ottley have some fun with this book, even if they had to kill an alternate version of Michonne from a different reality where she didn't star in The Walking Dead. Will readers get an issue #18 (or #2)? Who knows.
