Comic-Con News: It’s only fitting that for Comic-Con week Entertainment Weekly celebrates the hottest comic book property of them all, Robert Kirkman’s The Walking Dead, which has inspired the most watched drama series telecast in basic cable history.  The new issue of EW features no fewer than three different Walking Dead covers, one depicting Andrew Lincoln as Rick Grimes, one with Norman Reedus as the fan favorite character Daryl Dixon, and one with the youthful Chandler Riggs as Carl Grimes.  The new issue also includes a photo of one of the new additions to the scrappy band of survivors, Bob Stookey, a character from both the comic and The Road to Woodbury novel who is played by Lawrence Gilliard Jr. (The Wire).
 

The Walking Dead’s new showrunner Scott Gimple also talks about the differences between Season 3, where much of the threat to our small band came from other survivors led by the fascist Governor, and Season 4 where the zombie hordes return and a very different sort of menace from within arises.  Gimple didn’t totally explain the new menace to EW, remarking cryptically, "The new threat is something you can’t just stab in the face.  You can’t talk sense to it.  You can’t make a truce with it.  It’s beyond all that.  It would be a threat in any world, but in this world it is much more terrifying."
 
Whatever the new menace turns out to be, there will be plenty of walkers around when Season 4 kicks off.  Executive producer and makeup maestro Greg Nicotero noted, "The first episode (of Season 4) we had days when there were 150 walkers."  It is the bizarre, often morbidly funny makeup that Nicotero applies to these zombie extras that provides much of the AMC series’ appeal to viewers, and if the network hopes to improve on the 12.3 million viewers that set all sorts of basic cable records for the Season 3 finale (see "'Dead,' 'Thrones' Set Records"), it won’t hurt to have a mob of colorfully made-up walkers in the debut episode of Season 4.
 
With the demise of a number of characters in Season 3 (Lori, Merle, T-Dog, Andrea), it makes sense to add some new blood to the dwindling band of survivors in Season 4, and among the most enigmatic of the newcomers is Bob Stookey, who is being played by The Wire’s Lawrence Gilliard Jr.  Stookey is deeply troubled and his problems may predate the zombie apocalypse.  As showrunner Scott Gimple put it, "His backstory is not entirely the same as in the comic and the novel.  I think he’s seen things go bad over and over, and winding up in this stable place doesn’t shake him from his experience.  He struggles with that."