The Walking Dead: Who Is Negan?

Following this morning’s news that Negan has been cast on AMC’s The Walking Dead, we thought it we be appropriate to take a look at who the inappropriate, ruthless, fearless, psychotic leader is from The Walking Dead‘s source material: the comics.

Be warned, major spoilers follow for The Walking Dead comics.

Negan is the leader of the Saviors. So, before we get to Negan, we have to answer another question: Who are the Saviors? Well, they’re anything but what their name claims.

The Saviors are a band of savages in the comics who follow Negan’s every word. They don’t necessarily follow him because they want to but because if they don’t, he’ll screw their wives and burn half of their faces with an iron as a permanent reminder to the rest of the crew that they misbehaved.

Negan is the ruthless leader of this group who likes killing and cursing – a lot. I mean, he literally has a line where he says about 20 words and not one of them isn’t the f-word, the c-word, or mother. He carries a barbed wire bat around named Lucille and Lucille is the only lady/person he treats with respect, despite enforcing a rule of no raping among his gang. She gets thirsty and he gives her blood to drink.

Upon his introduction in the infamous issue #100, Negan and his massive band of crazies brought Rick, Heath, Carl, Maggie, Glenn, Sophia and Michonne outside of the walls and lined them up on their knees. After demanding to know who the leader is, Negan ruled Rick out as his victim, claiming he would be a martyr and Alexandria would rally behind his death. A game of eenie-meenie-minie-moe ensues and Negan selects Glenn and unleashes a hellish swing of his bat straight down onto Glenn’s skull. Rick and the group have no choice but to watch as Glenn’s head is completely bashed to bits.

From here, Negan demands half of Alexandria’s supplies at certain intervals or else he will kill someone else.

Naturally, Rick and the group rebel against Negan’s orders eventually, leading to a unified war against the Saviors, where the Safe-Zone and a few other communities teamed up to take on Negan.

Negan loses the war but isn’t killed. Instead, he is taken prisoner by Rick and in today’s comics, he remains in an Alexandria jail.

Most of this takes place in The Walking Dead‘s Compendium 3, which makes it much easier to read the story than trying to buy each individual comic.