AMC’s The Walking Dead took pop culture by storm, a subject of water-cooler buzz in the vein of Lost or The X-Files. It was really something for a time. If you’d told me just a few years back that the channel that gave us Mad Men was going to air a critically acclaimed, highly successful series about the zombie apocalypse, I would have laughed in your face. But it turns out, none of that might have happened without one bold, bald-faced lie.

Back in 2013, The Hollywood Reporter posted an exclusive clip from the documentary Comics in Focus: The Image Revolution, in which The Walking Dead‘s Robert Kirkman talks about how difficult it was to get a publisher behind his idea for The Walking Dead.

In the interview, Robert Kirkman said about The Walking Dead , “When I pitched [it] originally, it was turned down, simply because there had never been a successful zombie book in the history of comics.”

Image publishers Eric Stephenson and Jim Valentino were skeptical. Why should they gamble on something that had never worked before on the comics page? They wanted a hook, something to make The Walking Dead stand out in an overcrowded genre.

So Kirkman sold them aliens.

The creator of The Walking Dead recalled, “I said, ‘Oh, I forgot to tell you that this is actually a big setup for an alien invasion.

See, the whole The Walking Dead zombie plague was a virus engineered by an alien race as a prelude to invasion and colonization. After all, if you want to wipe out a world’s dominant species, there’s nothing like zillions of man-eating, hard-to-kill reanimated corpses to thin out the human herd.

Robert Kirkman claimed that he would be laying hints about the alien element throughout the seemingly straightforward zombie narrative — I can’t believe I just typed that — so that The Walking Dead twist, like all good twists, would make you look back on everything that came before in an entirely different light.

And it was all, every last bit of it, a lie. Once the series had been given the green light and published a few issues, Stephenson called Robert Kirkman to praise his work but also to ask why there hadn’t been any Easter eggs hinting at the alien reveal yet.

Robert Kirkman laughed and admitted that he’d made all of that up and never intended to involve aliens in The Walking Dead. They wanted a hook, so he gave them a hook. Thankfully, the early issues of the series had already proven that Kirkman had a great story to tell, aliens notwithstanding, so it became just an amusing bit of comic history rather than an excuse to fire the dude.

Recalling Kirkman’s narrative sleight-of-hand, Valentino said, “If he would have told me what it was really about, I would have said, ‘Dude, that’s great, let’s [do it].’ But he didn’t, so at first I was really reluctant to do it.”

We can be grateful that Robert Kirkman told The Walking Dead lie to start and didn’t follow through with it. Sometimes that’s what it takes to get things done.