Time & Perspective Quote by Robert Kirkman

Kirkman is doing a quiet rebuke of the modern franchise reflex: when in doubt, add more bodies. The line sounds practical, even generous, but it’s really a statement about narrative economics. Every new character is a new promise to the audience - new backstory, new arc, new emotional debt. Inflate the roster too fast and you don’t get richness; you get a spreadsheet.

The specific intent is craft-forward. He’s arguing for depth over breadth, for letting existing players "shine" rather than treating them as placeholders until the next shiny introduction. The phrase "we've already got here" carries an almost domestic intimacy, as if the cast is a community with a limited amount of oxygen. "Before the team gets to have 400 members" is hyperbole that doubles as a diagnosis of genre bloat, especially in long-running comics and shared-universe storytelling where escalation often means multiplication.

Subtext: character is currency. Screen/page time is finite, and attention is the real budget. By foregrounding time as the scarce resource, Kirkman also signals respect for readers who’ve already invested. It’s a promise that their attachments won’t be discarded for novelty.

Contextually, this fits a writer who built massive, ongoing worlds (and the adaptations that follow) while resisting the superhero-industrial instinct to endlessly expand the bench. The best part is the mildness: it’s not a manifesto, it’s a boundary. In an era where IP growth is mistaken for story growth, Kirkman’s restraint reads like a small act of defiance.