Robert Kirkman (The Walking Dead) and Scott Spencer (Morning Glories) are adopting a “writer’s room approach” to their Image Comics dream team collaboration on Thief of Thieves, a new comic series that will debut from Kirkman’s Skybound imprint early next year.  Kirkman picked Spencer to write the first arc of the comic series because of Spencer’s emphasis on character development.  Spencer saw the first arc as a sort of pilot episode with each issue focusing on a different person in the life of the protagonist of the series, and thus providing a multi-faceted view of Conrad Paulson, an aging international super thief who is known as Redmond in criminal circles, where he is much more successful than in his private life.  Shawn Martinborough, an illustrator known for his shadowy noir style in such books as Batman: No Man’s Land and Luke Cage Noir will be the permanent interior and cover artist on the book.

 

Kirkman told USA Today, “Having worked on The Walking Dead TV show, I’ve really fallen in love with the way that TV shows are written, where a bunch of people get together and they plot stuff and people split off into their own little splinter groups and write episodes.  I think that’s a really neat way to tell stories and something that could be used in comics more often.”

 

Kirkman has lined up a number of other writers to continue the project after Spencer finishes his character-driven pilot arc, and The Walking Dead scribe also told USA Today that he would be penning an arc himself.  So far Spencer is the only other writer who has been connected with the project, which he has been co-plotting with Kirkman.  But Kirkman is clearly interested in the possibilities of collaboration: “When you have six brains working on something instead of one brain, there’s always all these things that you yourself wouldn’t really think of that make the project that much better.  And I can happily report that that’s definitely happening on this.”