I originally conceived of Outcast as a comic, but I couldn’t be more excited about Kyle’s story being remade for television. As we launch this official site (prepare for production updates!), I wanted to give you all a window into how Outcast is being translated from the page to the screen. I’m taking great care as we tell the same story—that narrative, those characters—on a totally different medium.
That said, I should be frank: I believe the TV version of a comic book should be entirely its own thing. I’ve been working in TV for a while on The Walking Dead and know that, without a doubt, you don’t want to just transcribe the comics into a script. The two Outcast projects—the comics and the series—are separate in my head. The coolest thing about it, truly, is that there’s going to be familiar elements, but like The Walking Dead, we’re going to come at things from a different angle and bring new ideas to this story.
There are certain ways to tell a story and certain mechanics that work well in comics that don’t work well on television and vice versa. In TV, you have motion and sound, you can expand on and change things in very cool ways that wouldn’t have worked on the page. That’s the fun part, the challenge—thinking about moving images, actors, sound.
Outcast is an epic story, and it only becomes more so on TV. Kyle is your average everyday human—aside from the fact that he’s been tormented by demonic possession. There’s The Exorcist, but the exorcism genre is open to a dramatic, realistic interpretation in the same way that the zombie epic was when The Walking Dead began. We’ll use tropes to develop deeper character stories. For me, it’s always about the people and their struggles because that’s the stuff that matters.
Writing Outcast was the first time I’ve started a comic knowing exactly what the benchmarks are, where I’m going and how it all wraps up, which is a pretty exciting prospect. I always referred to the Outcast comic as “horror epic,” and I think this series will live up to that as well.
There’s a lot to do before the show launches, but until then, I want to thank you all for being fans and being excited about this translation. Keep checking back here for updates—we’ve only just begun.
-Robert Kirkman