AMC has released a teaser image hyping the recently-announced The Walking Dead/Fear the Walking Dead crossover. Saturday at NYCC, The Walking Dead creator Robert Kirkman dropped the bombshell news that an as-yet-unnamed character from one of the shows will be making an appearance on the other at some point in the future, marking the first time the two zombie series have been directly tied together.

With The Walking Dead asserting itself as a ratings juggernaut and pop culture phenomenon, AMC in 2015 elected to double-down by launching the sister series Fear the Walking Dead, moving the action from Atlanta and environs to Los Angeles and introducing a whole new group of characters. The Walking Dead team has always insisted that no direct crossover would ever happen between the two series, owing to insurmountable logistical issues, but evidently they've changed their minds.

The actual crossover is still a long way off, giving fans plenty of time to speculate on how exactly the trick will be pulled off. In the meantime, AMC has offered up a bit of poster art to tease the highly unexpected but (for many fans) welcome marriage of the two halves of the TV franchise (via CBR.com).

When announcing the crossover, Kirkman made it clear that the two shows will remain distinct entities even if, this one time, they will be sharing a character:

“We want these shows to have their own legs and have their own stories and be their own. There are two Walking Dead shows. There is one character that is going to go from one show — that I will not name — and appear in the other show — that I will not name.”

Unless someone gets out a pair of pliers and goes to work on Robert Kirkman's toenails, we won't be finding out anytime soon which character is switching series. One of the odds-on crossover favorites has to be Heath, the Walking Dead character played by Corey Hawkins who suddenly vanished in the middle of season 7 and hasn't been seen since. Robert Kirkman has promised that Heath will return "eventually," and speculation is that his return could happen all the way across America in Fear the Walking Dead. The only issue there is that, as of now, Fear is well behind TWD on the shared-universe timeline and for Heath to make the move either FWTD would have to jump forward in time or the character would have to fall into some kind of time warp.

Logistically, it might be easier for a character from Fear the Walking Dead to disappear and then reappear much later in time on The Walking Dead. But if the plan is to give Fear the Walking Dead a little ratings boost, it probably makes the most sense to transplant one of the more-popular second-tier characters (possibly Tara or Rosita) from the main show over to Fear, in hopes that more Walking Dead fans will then get interested.

One last possibility is that Fear the Walking Dead is set to come to a premature end, and Robert Kirkman has at least one character from that show he'd like to preserve by switching them over. Kim Dickens' Madison and Alycia Debnam-Carey's Alicia are the characters from Fear who would seem the best candidates to be rescued from that enterprise and given a chance to shine alongside Rick and the gang on the varsity team.

Next: Rick Rallies The Troops In New Walking Dead Season 8 Promo

Source: AMC