The Walking Dead: Daryl Dixon spin-off has been huge for AMC’s hit franchise but if creator Robert Kirkman had his way in the early days, it may never have seen the light of day.

Kirkman spoke today during an entertaining masterclass at Annecy about how he was constantly looking to kill off characters at the beginning including Norman Reedus’ iconic Daryl Dixon.

“When we started on Walking Dead I was the lunatic in the writers’ room who was like, ‘I don’t know, just kill the main character, who cares? We’ll do something weird’,” he said. “I was pushing to kill Daryl Dixon for a while. Any character in The Walking Dead at some point I was in the writers’ rooms saying, ‘Why don’t we kill them today?’.”

In the end, Kirkman held himself back from destruction and it’s a good thing he did, as the Daryl Dixon spin-off, which launched three years ago, has become a big hit for the franchise.

At Annecy today, Kirkman paid homage to the ultimate destroyer of his own characters, Game of Thrones creator George R. R. Martin, who he revealed he has never met.

“He is the master and I am but the learner,” Kirkman said. “He is way better at killing characters than me.”

Kirkman explained why he found adapting The Walking Dead from his hit graphic novels so difficult at the start.

“One of the things I thought was the coolest thing about the comics was you never knew what was going to happen next and it bugged me there was this source material [in the TV show] where you could kind of get a roadmap of what was coming,” he added. “And so I thought it would be cool to change that stuff. And we did change a lot of big things in The Walking Dead. As you get into later seasons you have this hodge podge of trying to take stories that work for characters that were still alive in the comics but were dead in the show. It becomes tedious and frustrating.”

The “horrible” ‘Invincible’ screenplay

For his Prime Video adult animation Invincible, which is produced by his own Skybound Entertainment, Kirkman said he “learned his lesson” and decided he would “ignore” questions around whether to align the comics with the TV show.

The series follows teenager Mark Grayson, a human-alien hybrid who becomes a crime-fighting superhero known as “Invincible” under the guidance of his father, Nolan / Omni-Man. In Invincible, which stars JK Simmons, Sandra Oh and Mark Hamill, Kirkman said he values the characters more.

“When these two characters are fighting across the globe I want you to get the sense that this is a historic event that people will be talking about for decades,” he added. “We do beautiful things in the show and its meant to give you some understanding of how bad these events can be and how monumental they would be in the real world.”

Kirkman said he believes Invincible, a passion project that he had been developing for years even before The Walking Dead, is now “vastly more popular” than The Walking Dead.

He revealed he was many years ago working on an Invincible movie script for Universal Studios, which he said was “absolutely horrible.” “It was just embarrassing, just bad,” he said. “It was a fun lesson because you fight for the opportunity to write your screenplay and then you personally keep the project from happening because you did that.”

In the end, for Kirkman, it all worked out, with Skybound producing Invincible in-house and Prime Video making multiple seasons.

Kirkman was talking to a packed Annecy crowd at the International Animation Film Festival. He will speak later with other Prime Video creators.