‘The Walking Dead’ Branches Out to Novels, Adorable Plush Toys

'Form follows function' is a principle of modern design. Things should look like what they do. Buildings made for the towering ambition of business people should jut upwards. Court houses should be solid, evenly structured, while being subtly imposing. Furniture in an office should be all about efficiency and in a living room should create an atmosphere of ease and intimacy.

If you take a look at "The Walking Dead," it seems that that principle has jumped to literature. The shambling, multitudinous, all-consuming horde that "The Walking Dead" describes has become the medium, not the message. After spreading like wildfire through comics, it's jumped over to television, plush toys, and now will be a trilogy of books.Robert Kirkman, the creator and series writer, will be outlining three upcoming novels for Thomas Dunne Books set in same world as "The Walking Dead" comics and the television show. He won't be embarking on this project alone -- what's a zombie project without numbers, after all -- and will feature Jay Bonansinga, author of the Ulysseys Grove mysteries, doing the actual scripting.

Kirkman says that the novel series is going to focus on "one very popular character who is no longer in the series anymore, and it shows how he came to the place that he ends up in the comic book series." We're guessing this narrows it down to a popular male character who is currently six feet under in comics, although in the world of "Walking Dead," that list isn't exactly short.

"It's all comic book continuity," Kirkman explained at CBR. "It'll basically be about characters that aren't in the series anymore, so it won't really effect continuity in the comic book series; it'll be little snippets of the past, really interesting nuggets."

If three kinds of zombie -- TV, comic, and novel -- still isn't enough zombie for you (and how could it be), there's also "The Walking Dead" busts, figurines, hardcovers, softcover trades, and a plushie to tide you over until you can sit on a stack of "The Walking Dead" trades in your "The Walking Dead" t-shirt, watching a "The Walking Dead" TV show while reading a "The Walking Dead" novel during the first couple of commercial breaks and checking out the buzz for the second "The Walking Dead" novel on the internet.

In true "The Walking Dead" fashion, if you're not dripping in zombies, you're probably in an abandoned prison.