Continuing his streak of CBR TV appearances at Comic-Con International in San Diego, comic book superstar Robert Kirkman once again boarded the CBR yacht to discuss the latest developments in the world of "The Walking Dead," the concept of hope in a world filled with flesh-eating zombies and his beautiful beard.

On his beard upkeep: I go out, I get my beard trimmed a day or two before I do anything in public. Sometimes I'll go into the writer's room and they'll be like, "Your beard is out of control!" I haven't done anything! What do you want from me? Yeah, I don't look like this very often. [Laughs]

On the nature of hope in "The Walking Dead": The story has evolved to the point where there are so many large communities that are to a certain extent thriving. The people on the Hilltop are doing okay, they've got a little bit of structure there. They've got food sources, they're doing alright. The people in the community where Rick's living, they have houses, they have things. They have running water. The book is evolving in a way that society is actually rebuilding and civilization is actually re-establishing. That's something that I always wanted to get to. In my wildest dreams, if the book could ever last 100 issues, it would be cool to get to a point where they actually start re-establishing civilization and they actually start building things again. That's the hope. In order to get there, there are still problems.

On whether he shocks himself with things he comes up with for "The Walking Dead": I try to think of the worst possible thing that could happen in that situation, those kind of things would never occur to me in conversation. There's a lot of words that Negan says that I just don't say, but yeah, I just try to go over-the-top with it and I enjoy it far too much. ... Negan's a fun character to write. There'll be issues where I think, "I don't know, I don't think this is very good," and then I put Negan in the scene and think, "We're good."