The Walking Dead Is Making Changes To Negan’s Origin For TV Adaptation

The Walking Dead fans have only gotten to know Negan’s backstory from a comic event titled Here’s Negan. The AMC series has loosely acknowledged some events of that backstory through dialogue with Jeffrey Dean Morgan’s character but with the six Season 10 bonus episodes coming up, The Walking Dead is about to go all in on a real Here’s Negan story with an episode by the same title. As the episode nears, showrunner Angela Kang is admitting that there are some differences to the story on television by comparison to its comic book counterpart.

“It’s something we’ve always been looking forward to adapting at various times and gone, like, ‘Oh, it’s definitely going to fall in this stretch,’ or, ‘It’s definitely down that stretch,’” Kang explained to EW. “It’s just kind of moved around. And it felt like this was the right time to do it here because we were able to tie it to something he’s going through in the current timeline.”

With Negan’s wife Lucille being played by Morgan’s real life wife Hilarie Burton Morgan, the late wife will have survived a bit longer than she did in the comics as was revealed by a trailer for the upcoming episodes.

“I’ll say that it’s not exactly the same as what people have read in the page, because to tell you the truth, we’ve told some of those bits and pieces of story,” Kang says. “We didn’t show it, but he’s talked about his relationship with Lucille to various people. We kind of took little bits and pieces over time. So when we looked at it, we were like, ‘To do this, we sort of need a very strong way into it. What does it mean for him? And really, like emotionally, what’s the story that we can tell?’”

As with most stories which have rolled out on the TV show, pieces of The Walking Dead comic are going to be brought to life while others are a bit different from the pages. “I think that in some ways it’s very true to the comic, in that it is true to the spirit of the love that he has for Lucille, but there’s a lot in our adaptation that is original to the show, but in a way that I think supports the same sort of emotional journey that I think he takes on the page,” Kang exlpains. “So there’s some lines that are almost straight out of the book, which people who are comic fans will recognize. And then there’s other things where we’ve made some different choices, but that hopefully will still be really cool.”

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The Walking Dead airs Sundays at 9pm ET on AMC.