Negan’s Full Backstory Revealed As Lucille Is Born In The Walking Dead Flashback Special

Negan’s backstory in The Walking Dead has now finally been told in full through 16 issues of Here’s Negan.

Spoilers for Here’s Negan follow.

On the final pages of the 4-page Part 16 of Here’s Negan, the villain found his group of survivors and turned them into followers.

Following Negan’s introduction to Dwight, an innocent and good-hearted survivor, The Walking Dead‘s villain conquered the group through powerful leadership choices which kept them safe. His instinctual skills offered a charismatic approach which served as a magnetic force for those around him. Having lost his wife Lucille, survival was all Negan had to motivate him.

However, he did maintain a set of principles. When Negan’s new group of friends encountered a new bunch who endorsed rape and other despicable actions, Negan used a baseball bat he had obtained along the way to bash the skull of this group’s leader. The group looked on, terrified, as Dwight kept them in order while Negan used barbed wire nearby to wrap the bat.

“I wasn’t scared. I wasn’t sad. I wasn’t angry,” Negan explained. “It took me a long time to realize why…It was Lucille.”

Negan went on to address the group, suggesting they pool resources and follow him, but, more specifically, they will now work for him as he offers to protect them with Lucille from people like their former leader.

Of course, the new world order didn’t fall into place without a few threats.

“Fall the f— in line or I’ll crawl up that pee hole of yours, get really deep inside so I can really get a message to those big balls without anything getting lost in translation,” Negan said to one man who questioned him. “And I’ll say — Big Balls, I know you think you’re the King S— of F— Mountain and you’re not accustomed to taking s— from anyone but things are different now because — HERE’S NEGAN!”

With that, Negan was in charge, and the rest is history on the pages of The Walking Dead comics, beginning with issue #100.

Pre-Apocalypse

The common word of Negan being a car salesman prior to the apocalypse is incorrect. The rumor started when Robert Kirkman ruled it a possibility in the Letter Hacks section of a Walking Dead issue, but Here’s Negan revealed the villain’s true story.

Prior to the zombie virus taking over, Negan was a high school gym teacher and a ping pong coach. He wasn’t just any gym teacher, though. Negan wanted to be the cool teacher. He cursed at his students and gave them a hard time when they would fail, which he saw as a method of pushing them — even when they would feel bullied and start to cry. 

Before everyone around him started to die, Negan had a wife. During his marriage, however, Negan began having an affair. His wife had full knowledge of the affair and allowed it to happen as she saw that Negan was happy with it, despite how it hurt her.

When Negan’s wife became diagnosed with terminal cancer, he immediately cut off his relationship with the other woman and tried to spend as much time with his wife as possible. The villain finally realized that he loved her, but she was furious that it took her cancer to make him cut off the affair. Still, he pushed her around in her wheelchair in the park and stayed by her side in the hospital until the end.

Negan’s wife’s name was Lucille. 

Applied to TV

According to The Walking Dead‘s showrunner Scott Gimple, the AMC TV series has plans to tell Negan’s backstory. 

“I do believe yes, it’s in the future,” Gimple told YahooTV. “You know, I’m always careful about this, [because] things can absolutely change. There’s a loose plan in place I have.”

As for whether or not the TV series will see Jeffrey Dean Morgan accurately portray the events of Here’s Negan: yes and no.

“I take that Here’s Negan story as the backstory,” Gimple said. “There’s some aspects of it that will probably be cool [on the show]. It’s some fairly far-flung stuff… in the future, you will see some stuff from that. Might need to get Damon Lindelof to do it. It might be rather Lost-ian, but we’re talking a good while away.”

If the TV series wants to tell Negan’s story at the same time the comics did, the character’s rise into villainy, an episode – or series of episodes – would likely be featured around Season 10 or Season 11. By the time Negan’s story is told in the Here’s Negan book, the main Walking Dead comic series had already concluded the All Out War story and launched its Whisperer War story a couple of years later.

Hardcover Collection

The Walking Dead‘s sibling series Fear the Walking Dead returns September 10th. The Walking Dead will return for its eighth season on October 22, 2017. The Season Eight premiere will mark 100 episodes overall for the popular AMC series. For complete coverage and insider info all season long, follow @BrandonDavisBD on Twitter.