Zombie Sentience Debate Finally Laid to Rest by Walking Dead Creator

By now most zombie fiction either tries to put its own spin on genre tropes which are best known to the audience through The Walking Dead ( for example, in your average zombie fiction of today, such as The Last of Us, zombies are mindless corpses re-animated through biological means, their initial spread and societal collapse are caused by an epidemic, and the main enemies for most of the plot are actually human survivors), or defines itself by defying or subverting those tropes.

So, it is not a surprise, that the world of The Walking Dead is scrutinized by avid fans down to the small details.

And among the questions that they often ask is whether the local zombies have some level of sentience, and whether there are some remnants of self-aware personality in their brains, which theoretically can be recovered.

This question is not surprising, given that zombies in The Walking Dead are intentionally patterned after George Romero's zombies, and those did have some intelligence (at times enough to communicate, use tools and even form plans), and became smarter over time, though their behavior still was completely dominated by huger.

However, for The Walking Dead the answer to this question is firm "no". In his ongoing color reprint of the famed comic series, The Walking Dead Deluxe, Robert Kirkman, the writer of that series, is regularly answering all manners of questions which fans mail to him.

In the most recent issue #57 by Kirkman, Charlie Adlard, and Dave McCaig, Kirkman discussed the question of whether zombies have any perception of the world, and if so, would he do an issue from zombies' perspective.

As Kirkman wrote, "people ask for this a lot", but he responded with "zombies are mindless".

When the letter asked if there might be some unforeseen evolution in the zombie condition that could lead to resurrection, Kirkman wrote:

"No... there couldn't be. This book just isn't about the zombies. Don't expect any huge revelations or changes in their behavior... nothing huge I mean... we'll learn a little bit more about them as the series progresses – but none of them are going to sprout wings or grow to fifty feet tall."

So, case closed – as far as The Walking Dead is concerned, zombies are just dumb shamblers.