Today marks the release of The Walking Dead: The Alien by writer Brian K. Vaughan and artist Marcos Martin on Panel Syndicate . Panel Syndicate is a place where Vaughan and Martin make comics meant to be read digitally -- their first comic was the neo-noir thriller The Private Eye and next up is the bilingual mystery Barrier -- but what makes them stick out is their "pay what you want" policy. You can download their comics, DRM free, and name your own price, including zero dollars.

The Walking Dead: The Alien Cover by Marcos Martin

Robert Kirkman approached the duo with a deal: let him print The Private Eye at Image Comics and in exchange they would get to do a single issue of The Walking Dead for Panel Syndicate. The bargain was struck, The Private Eye is currently on shelves in a gorgeous hardcover collection, and now today the first-ever Walking Dead comic not penned by Kirkman is out in the wild.We talked to Vaughan and Martin on the phone, separately, about how they chose the setting, the story, and what they thought of their first time doing a zombie comic. They also hint about how this comic ties to the main series.Please note that this article is a spoiler-free zone. If you've read it, please don't spoil it for others in the comments. Anyone who posts spoilers will have their comment deleted and be banned. We'll be posting another article later today that will act as a place to discuss the issue in full spoilery detail.Now, onto the interviews.

I'm a huge Walking Dead fanboy, and I've been a fan of that comic since the first issue came out. I picked it up -- and I still own my original Walking Dead #1, which could probably put my children through college if I sold it. Anyway, I loved the book, and I knew that there were some unanswered questions that Robert had hinted at, and I just thought when we were thinking up ideas about, you know, "Why not make a big swing, and I'll know he'll say no," but I thought there would be a way in this story to answer one of those questions that I think hardcore readers maybe always wondered about.As to how we came up with the idea for what became Walking Dead: The Alien, as soon as I saw Robert would see that title, he would say, "No way, we are not telling this story." But he read through our whole proposal, and much to my shock and delight at the end he was like, "Yeah, this is cool. You guys can absolutely do that."I think it started at first with the location that I knew, having read Walking Dead for a hundred-plus issues, I didn't remember ever seeing Robert and Charlie cut outside of the United States, and I thought, "Well, this will be the first thing that Robert will say, 'No, you can't do,' but we might as well ask," for two reasons.One is that Marcos is based out of Barcelona, so it would be easy for him to draw these beautiful surroundings. It would feel different than any story we'd seen before.But it was also that Panel Syndicate is this site that has a global reach, and usually when I do a comic like Saga, if you're a reader in China or Japan or Russia or any of the other countries where we do translations, you have to wait six months or a year to read what other people read. But at Panel Syndicate, anyone anywhere in the world gets to read it all on the same day, so we thought, "Well, if we have this global audience, why just set it in the United States where we've seen it before? Let's pick something new and different."That's interesting. Yeah, I guess, Marcos and I love digital comics, because we love how easy it is to distribute them and how little interference there is between the readers and us. You know, we didn't want any bells and whistles. We didn't want to do a motion comic or add music or anything like that. We just like words and pictures, but Marcos did come up with this format of something that looks nice on a screen -- and I've seen some people blow it up on their Apple TVs, they'll project it, and it looks fantastic, to just read a comic that fills up an HDTV. It's incredible.But no, I think it still fits the classic language of comics. You still get cool page-turn surprises and stuff like that. So I guess the format gives you an opportunity maybe to do some widescreen spectral shots of Barcelona. But if you like reading the Walking Dead comic, then we hope you will be able to enjoy this.Yeah, I guess, you know, I'd never really written a zombie comic before, and getting to see any kind of zombie attack was great, but I don't think that's why people love The Walking Dead. You know, that's why people love a zombie movie, but by the time you're on hour four of The Walking Dead, you're already far beyond most zombie stories, and you're not really so much about the undead as you are about just, what does it mean to be human at this point?So yeah, just getting to have quiet moments between two characters who really get to speak unfiltered about, what does it mean to be alive, and how hard do you want to fight to survive -- I love that stuff. So just getting to write about ordinary people in an extraordinary circumstance, that was really fun.So our first series was this book called The Private Eye, this 10-part, futuristic, sci-fi mystery, and we have a new series that Marcos and I just started; it will be shorter.We're planning it to be a five-issue series, but it's called Barrier, and it is a crime story about immigration with one very big twist at the end of the first issue. So people can check that out right now on PanelSyndicate.com -- and, as always, whatever they want to donate to us, including just "zero" if you want to try it for free. But right after The Walking Dead comes out, shortly thereafter, the second issue of Barrier will come out. I think if you like the sort of Barcelona setting that you will enjoy this sort of bilingual mystery that continues to unfold in a really unexpected way in Barrier.So yeah, we've got Barrier, and really our hope after that is, we just want more creators at Panel Syndicate, and the deal is the same one that we have: If you're willing to do the work for free upfront, you get to keep 100 percent of whatever the audience chooses to donate to us. So we'll see. This Walking Dead project could make zero dollars for us or it could make a lot, but I think if it does well, we would like to pour it back into Panel Syndicate and maybe help bring some more people over to the site to do comics.100 percent, yeah. It was really cool, we told Robert, "This is the way we do things. We won't ask for a page rate upfront or anything. We'll bet on ourselves and do this for free. But then we'll put it up online, and, yeah, people can pay what they want. They can pay zero, they can pay a dollar, they can give us $200 -- they can do whatever they want." And Robert said, "That's ballsy of you guys to do that, so I'll let you keep 100 percent. I'll play by Panel Syndicate's rules," which was just absurdly generous of him to do that.So yeah, whatever people choose to donate, we'll get to keep, which I'm grateful for mostly because of Marcos. Writing comics is the relatively easy part, but Marcos has really been slaving for months on this, and totally for free. So I hope people will be generous, but if you don't have enough money for comics, feel free to download it for free, on us. Marcos is a bit of a socialist that way. We just want people to read the story and enjoy it, and hopefully make just enough to keep us making more of these.You know, we asked for permission first off, here is our story that we didn't think they would let us do, and Robert supported it 100 percent, and then I think we sent over some character sketches and said, "How do these walkers look at this stage of decomposition? Are we on target, on model, for these?" You know, we sent character sketches of our two main leads.But no, after that they just said, "Have fun! Make it your own, and do a good job." Like I say, it's been eight years since I've done any work for hire, and Robert is easily the kindest, easiest boss I've ever had to work for. He's just supportive and let us do pretty much whatever we wanted.Yeah, I mean, this is Marcos Martin, I think one of the best artists of his generation, doing black-and-white art for the first time. It's so pretty, even if you hate my writing. How can you not turn up for that? And if you are a fan of The Walking Dead, I think this story will answer some things that you may have been wondering about for a long time. It's called Walking Dead: The Alien, and if that's not enough of a compelling mystery for you to check out and the fact that you can pay whatever the heck you want, I don't know what more to tell you if you're not going to pick that up.