“If you’ve been paying attention to the buildup of this story from arc to arc, you might have suspected that we were nearing a natural end point…and we are, issue #36 was always planned to be the final issue,” wrote Kirkman. “When we conceived of this series, I thought of it as a trilogy of 12-issue arcs. Looking back, you can see the time jumps between #12 and #13, as well as #24 and #25, marked definitive chapter breaks along the way. That was by design.”