This summer, AMC will unleash The Walking Dead's first-ever spinoff series, Fear the Walking Dead . With no actual characters in common with the original series (the connective tissue being the shared-zompocalypse), FTWD will take us out to the West Coast where we'll follow the intertwined families of Kim Dickens' Madison and Cliff Curtis' Travis as they deal with the zombie outbreak in Los Angeles.

Kim Dickens and Cliff Curtis in AMC's Fear the Walking Dead.

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Walking Dead comic creator Robert Kirkman, who serves as an executive producer on both AMC shows, recently spoke to us about Fear the Walking Dead and how he took it on as a challenge to create something new and vital more than a decade after he created Rick Grimes and the Atlanta survivors. Kirkman addressed the specific look, tone, and characters of the new series as well as his thoughts on the possibility of more Walking Dead spinoffs."[These characters] really kind of sprang about with the idea of doing another show," Kirkman told IGN. "When AMC asked if I be interested in doing a companion show to The Walking Dead, my mind went into the mode… I created The Walking Dead when I was 23. I was 34, 35 at the time we started developing this. I made a competition with myself. I wanted to see if I could come up with something cooler or more unique. What does old, tired, sad Robert Kirkman think about the apocalypse as opposed to the young, energetic version that did the first comic? It turns out that old, sad, tired Robert Kirkman needed the help of Dave Erickson. Working with Dave, he and I came up with all these characters and created this world, this Los Angeles version of Walking Dead. There are no leftovers or B-sides. These aren’t people that didn’t fit into Walking Dead or the comic or anything like that. This is an all-new cast created specifically for this show.”"One of the things we’re trying to play with this tight-knit family unit in Fear the Walking Dead is this concept of an extended unique family," Kirkman continued. "What we have is Madison (Kim Dickens) and her family and we have Travis (Cliff Curtis) and his family. They’re building a relationship. They’re getting ready to be married. Civilization is crumbling around them. They both have kids from separate marriages. It’s just an interesting family dynamic to deal with in any story. But having all of the intricacies and struggles that come from that kind of family dynamic, and setting it against the fall of civilization and in the face of the zombie apocalypse just makes things that more interesting."Fear the Walking Dead will take viewers back to the very start of the undead outbreak, something that The Walking Dead series sort of skipped over. "I think the most surprising thing about this show for fans is that we’ll be pointing out all the things that we glossed over on the other show," Kirkman revealed. "I think having Rick wake up from his coma was certainly a fun dynamic and a great way to open the original show, but actually watching civilization crumble around these people and getting to experience them learning how to adapt in a much faster way, and with much more danger and much more uncertainty, is going to make this show very different. One thing that this show is going to provide is a very unique experience for people even if they have watched the first five seasons of The Walking Dead."So will the zombies look the same if we're dealing with the very first moments of the chaos? Kirkman mentioned that they'll look markedly different. "They’re not going to be as decayed," he stated, "and they’re not going to be as monstrous, which is going to make the violence in the show and the different things that happen that much more startling. Because we’re going to be dealing with a much more human walker. So while there is going to be a tremendous amount of paranoia and psychological trauma, I think there’s not going to be any loss of zombie action or excitement in this show. We’ll be bringing in the best of both worlds.”"One of the things that was really important to us from day one was that this show stands alone," Kirkman added. "We wanted to it stand alone story-wise and character-wise. We wanted it to have its own corner of the universe. All of that extended to what our visual take on this show would be. I have to say, a big portion of that came from Adam Davidson, our director for the pilot of Fear the Walking Dead. He’s going to be directing a fair number of episodes of the show moving forward. He was able to come in with just a unique vision of Los Angeles as a city, but also bring a very different flavor."If we're going to be witnessing the beginnings of the zombie plague, does that mean Fear the Walking Dead will address its actual origins? No way, as Kirkman explained. "I still maintain that’s not an important aspect of the story," he said. "I think watching Fear the Walking Dead, you’ll get a bigger picture of the world, but as far as digging down to actually find the smoking gun and realizing what that causes, it’s really just unimportant to the overall story. You’ll see when you start watching the show. If we were to do a spinoff of The Walking Dead and it was about a bunch of scientists that were working to find the cure and finding out the origins, that would bore me to tears."With Fear the Walking Dead now here to bridge the summer gap between Walking Dead seasons, could another Walking Dead spinoff come about to fill in the winter midseason gap? Kirkman laughed and said that more shows are always a possibility. "I wouldn’t necessarily rule it out even though I currently have no plans to do that right now. Everybody is working really hard on Fear the Walking Dead and trying to make it the best thing that it can be. Let’s see how Fear the Walking Dead does first and then we’ll have nine spinoffs and it’ll be great."

Fear the Walking Dead will premiere this summer on AMC.Matt Fowler is a writer for IGN. Follow him on Twitter at @TheMattFowler and Facebook at Facebook.com/Showrenity