How That Rick Grimes Shocker Happened in The Walking Dead Comics

[Spoiler alert: This article contains spoilers for the series premiere of The Walking Dead: The Ones Who Live.] Rick Grimes has been shot, stabbed, beaten to a bloody pulp, and blown up on a bridge filled with zombies, but the injury-prone survivor made it out of The Walking Dead relatively unscathed. That changed in AMC’s new Walking Dead spinoff The Ones Who Live. In the opening minutes of Sunday’s “Years” series premiere, a desperate Rick (Andrew Lincoln) chopped off his hand with an ax during a failed attempt to escape the clutches of the CRM. The Walking Dead‘s latest amputee then cauterized the wound by plunging his arm into a burning walker corpse.

Rick’s injury happened while on a voluntary assignment with the Civic Republic’s army. Five years into his consignment with the Civic Republic Military, Rick was tethered to a CRM soldier during a level-three hazardous event: protecting the Civic Republic’s crops and food stores from being destroyed by a horde of flaming walkers. Rick ran as far as his steel leash allowed, wrapped his belt around his arm as a tourniquet… and severed his left hand at the wrist with a slice of his blade.

Rick suffered a similarly gruesome injury in The Walking Dead comics, which foreshadowed Rick losing a hand during the prison arc. Rick once beat a prisoner so brutally that he broke every finger in his mangled right hand (in The Walking Dead #17):

 …and Rick was forced to hack off a zombie-bitten Allen’s leg with a hatchet (in The Walking Dead #21):

When Rick, Michonne, and Glenn ran across the Governor of Woodbury, the villain pinned Rick down and cut off his hand with a knife (in The Walking Dead #28). Rick passed out from blood loss and woke up to find that his hand had been amputated.

Rick eventually had the Hilltop’s blacksmith, Earl Sutton, make him a prosthetic hand that he debuted with his new look (in The Walking Dead #127):

Rick’s TV counterpart also receives a prosthetic hand: a black-gloved fist that unsheathes a single blade with a flick of the wrist.

Lincoln, who co-created The Ones Who Live with co-star Danai Gurira and showrunner Scott M. Gimple, previously told ComicBook that he lobbied for the show to cut off Rick’s hand during season 4 of The Walking Dead.

“You know, I campaigned two seasons ago when the Governor wasaround… I was saying, ‘You’ve gotta do the hand, guys!’ And Victor[Scalise], who was in charge of special effects, just said, ‘No, no nono. Anybody else, but not you. It’ll cost a fortune with green screen andblue screen,’” Lincoln explained to ComicBook in a 2015 interview. “But you know, I’m of the opinionthat certainly with where the story seems to be going [in season 6], noone is safe of any long term damage.” Rick ultimately made it out of season 6 and The Walking Dead without long term damage… but now the gloves are off.

New episodes of The Walking Dead: The Ones Who Live premiere Sundays on AMC and AMC+. Stay tuned to ComicBook/TWD and follow on Facebook for more TWD Universe coverage.