In one of the most costly blunders in film history, the original Night of the Living Dead was sent to theaters with no copyright notice in the credits. As a result, the film has been in the public domain since its release in 1968, allowing Kirkman—or anybody else for that matter—to write new content set in George Romero’s zombie universe. Kirkman and Moore came up with a new idea, complete with some sample pages that they again pitched to Image Comics.
This new pitch was set in the Night of the Living Dead universe and one page drawn by Moore even depicted the same news reporter from the film giving a public broadcast about the burgeoning zombie epidemic. This version of The Walking Dead would still start out following Rick, Lori (then named Carol), and Carl but would be set in the late ’60s, its events running concurrent to those in the film. The comic would even portray the zombies as they looked in Night of the Living Dead—more fresh cadavers than rotting corpses—to better match the film’s aesthetic.
