Will The Walking Dead Change Negan’s Comic Debut For Television?

With only two episodes remaining in The Walking Dead‘s sixth season, the world’s introduction to Negan is at most 12 days away, possibly only five.

“When is he coming?” and “What will he do when he gets here?” have been the only thing fans have wanted to discuss ever since Jeffrey Dean Morgan was cast in the role.

The powers that be in The Walking Dead’s production team have done a great job keeping the character’s introduction a secret. That doesn’t mean they’re not willing to talk about the character. Showrunner Scott Gimple recently opened up about Negan on many levels.

Here’s what Gimple had to say about his first impression of the character:

The pat answer is he’s unlike anybody we’ve seen on The Walking Dead, and further, I think he’s unlike anyone we’ve seen. He is a singular character, I think, of the last 10 to 20 years of popular culture. I find him to be a fascinating character. When I was first reading about Negan in the books and talking to [Walking Dead creator Robert Kirkman] about it, I was blown away with this character. Through another lens, he’s not a bad guy at all in the comic. He does some horrible things, but ourpeople do some horrible things. He is, though, this unrepentant a-hole. He is somebody who is the ultimate bully.

Gimple didn’t shy away from sharing details of the character’s personality, either.

He is this force of nature. He’s charismatic. A lot of villains on shows and comics and everything, it’s like, “Oh they’re the villain that you love to hate.” I think Negan is the villain that you hate to love. But you just love him. And he does some horrible things, but he has a reason for them.

He’s not a psychopath, and in some ways, he has this bizarre sort of empathy to him. It’s bizarre that he actually does have some empathy and he does have a system and he does have, in some ways, even reason. There are a lot of moments that are so terrifying because you can’t reason with him because he’s made up his mind on something. But he does reason things out. He isn’t just some psychopath. He’s such an enjoyable character to read. He’s been an enjoyable character to write, although a lot of it is Robert’s writing from the book. I would just say you haven’t seen anything like him on The Walking Dead.

The big question, though, regards Negan’s entrance. Comic book fans know that upon arrival in issue #100, Negan’s introduction was high impact – on Glenn’s skull. The menace used his barbed wire wrapped baseball bat to smash Glenn’s skull in front of his friends to make his point. Will the show follow those moments? We’ll have to wait and see to know for sure but Gimple wants fans to know that he is here to make the best show possible.

Let me put it this way: Whatever it is, it’s really just all in service to being faithful to the comic book inasmuch as one can. That’s always going to be relatively subjective as to what that means. But taking inspiration from the moments of the comic book and playing them out to the ends of what it can be, it’s all just like taking that moment from the book and figuring out a way to turn it up to get those feelings that it gave you and those emotions that it gave you that much more.

Sometimes we have things from the book that people who read the comics maybe see coming a mile away, and we try to adjust that so that we can give them the same feeling they had when reading the book, which might have been shock or surprise or fear, any of those things. It might be wildly different, but it’s all to get the same sort of feelings that you got when you read them. So will it be different? Absolutely. Will it be the same thing? Absolutely.

So much of the changes of what we do in the comic have to do with that. Sometimes things happen to completely different characters. It wasn’t Lizzie who killed Mika. Carl was the one involved that story when it was Billy and Ben. But I think we still got that same sort of emotion and horror that we got from that moment in the book. So we want to tell the story of the book but from an emotional standpoint first, and that does often create the changes that we do.

The Walking Dead has two episodes left in its sixth season, airing Sundays at 9 PM ET on AMC.

source: EW