The Walking Dead Has A Terrifying Negan And Glenn Easter Egg in Shocking New Issue

The Walking Dead shocked its readers with issue #192. When its preceding issue ended with Rick Grimes getting shot in the chest, many of the loyal readers assumed Robert Kirkman would not actually kill the lead character of his hit zombie comic — but he did. After the one bullet did some serious damage in issue #191, the annoyance that is Sebastian Milton put a few more bullets through Rick Grimes to finish the job on the early pages of issue #192. When Sebastian was jailed for his actions, an encounter with Carl Grimes came complete with a creepy reference to the issue where Negan killed Glenn.

While reading Carl Grimes talking to Sebastian through the jail cell, I was thinking, “This feels a lot like Rick asserting himself as the better human when he was talking to Negan in jail.” It was a lot like those pages — Carl made claims about what Rick would’ve wanted and how much more joy seeing Sebastian suffer will bring him than having him dead would. The parallels between Rick and Carl were there until Carl’s final words to Sebastian: “Ta-ta.”

In issue #100, Negan was introduced and bashed the skull of Glenn in front of all of the survivors. He ranted and used sarcasm as a weapon to belittle the survivors from the Alexandria community. When it was all said and done with and he left the group behind, his last words to the group in the infamous issue were: “Ta-ta.”

This is most certainly not a coincidence from writer Robert Kirkman, who always seemed to enjoy developing a relationship between Negan and Carl.

Is this a sign of Carl possibly combining the leadership styles of two of the most effective leaders seen in The Walking Dead‘s 192 issues to date? The character certainly bore resemblances to both Rick and Negan while talking to Sebastian.

“Rick’s death was planned longer than any death in this series,” Kirkman said in the Letter Hacks section of issue #192. “I’ve been working toward this since I started writing… issue #1. It doesn’t make it any easier, but it’s been something I’ve been getting more and more used to as the years got down to months and then weeks… I knew it was coming.”

The Carl and Negan reference is not the only Easter Egg hidden in issue #192. Rick’s death came with an image that was a creepy mirror of one of his first panels in the post-apocalyptic series. Check it out below, with Rick waking up in his hospital bed put side by side with him dying in his Commonwealth bed.

“Even before we introduced Sebastian Milton (in issue #177) I knew he was the one who would kill Rick Grimes. For almost a decade now I knew Rick would choose to preserve the Commonwealth no matter the cost… and it would cost him his life,” Kirkman says. “I’ve said in interview for many, many years that everyone dies in this story, and that even Rick Grimes won’t survive until the end. While this was always Rick’s story thus far, as written about in the first issue, that doesn’t mean he needs to be alive to be a presence in the series. This is the story of a world profoundly affected by that man, as we’ll see starting next issue… but it isn’t exclusively Rick’s story.”

What do you think of Robert Kirkman’s decision to kill Rick Grimes in The Walking Dead comics? Share your thoughts in the comment section or send them my way on Instagram and Twitter.

The Walking Dead issue #192 is available now in comic book stores. The Walking Dead TV series returns for its tenth season in October. Fear the walking Dead airs Sundays at 9pm ET on AMC.