Interview: Skybound is much more than just The Walking Dead and Invincible

Skybound CEO David Alpert and managing partner Jon Goldman tell us about Skybound's future.

Omni-Man in Mortal Kombat 1. / Warner Bros.

“What a lot of people don’t realize is that The Walking Dead was a top 3 show on Netflix – in 2023,” Skybound’s managing partner Jon Goldman tells us in the busy halls of Gamescom LATAM 2024. “It is still extremely popular.”

Skybound Entertainment isn’t just a comic book publisher or a video game studio, and it’s not just the company that ensures new episodes of Invincible are being put onto Amazon Prime. It’s all of those things, and a lot more. “I’m a fan – as a fan, this is something I want,” Skybound CEO David Alpert tells us. 

Skybound

The Walking Dead and Invincible are by far the biggest and most important titles in Skybound’s roster, but the company has found success with a Hasbro collaboration which saw them print Transformers and Void Rivals comics. A deal with Audible also sees the company producing podcasts and audiobooks like the original adventure Impact Winter, and the true crime series Death by Unknown Event. Skybound isn’t a one-trick pony, resting on its successful series – there are more potential breakout successes just waiting in the wings. But that doesn’t mean that each will get a TV series and a successful video game.

“You can’t make your multimedia franchise happen through ‘the secret’, you can’t just put it out into the universe and hope that happens,” Alpert tells us of sensations like The Walking Dead and Invincible. “You have to find the fanbase that connects with it organically. Success is a conversation between the creative and the audience, and there’s a push-pull, but if nobody’s buying the comic book, there’s no show.

The Walking Dead comics. / Skybound Entertainment

“It really is the dream. I mean, I don’t know about you, but for a decade and a half I was like ‘I can’t believe there’s no more freaking Star Wars,’” Alpert says of Invincible’s multimedia prospects. “There’s a window where [fans] want to be engaged, and [we] need to engaging, otherwise it could be too late or a really long time.”

It seems likely that a triple-A Invincible game is in development, and the Skybound team is clearly hopeful that it will be just as much of a phenomenon as Telltale’s The Walking Dead once was. This won’t be the first time you see Invincible in a triple-A game though, thanks to Omni-Man’s appearance in Mortal Kombat 1.

“Robert [Kirkman, Skybound chairman] is a massive Mortal Kombat fan, and has been dying to find a way to get into the Mortal Kombat space for like 20 years,” Alpert explains. “We’re like ‘Hey, remember us?’”

Omni-Man in Mortal Kombat 1. / Warner Bros.

While not every Skybound series can be a breakout success, the team is keen to follow the trends they see in their franchises. “Impact Winter, our vampire audio fiction – it’s pretty great, and it was the number one Audible original of all time,” Alpert tells us. “We’ve done a soundtrack, but we’re going to be turning that into – hopefully soon – a television show.” 

It’s easy to see franchises like The Walking Dead as having fallen off, but as the Skybound team has explained to us, there’s still a massive, engaged fanbase that’s consistently growing. Invincible might be the new golden child, but there are still more IPs and franchises waiting in Skybound’s wings that are set to break out. Whether that’ll be Impact Winter or something else, it’s hard to tell, but when it happens you can be sure that you’ll see video games, comics, podcasts, and more from Skybound.