Writer Robert Kirkman has released the eighth installment of Negan’s backstory in The Walking Dead comics, and you can’t blame the guy for going on a dark path.
Negan’s backstory is a standalone exclusive for the magazine Image+. In Part 8, we learn Negan first encounters his baseball bat Lucille when he runs into a random group of men on his travels, according to ComicBook.com. The men want Negan’s gas can, but he talks his way into creating a group. One of the guys is holding a bat sans barbed wire, which eventually takes.
This is where we start to see Negan’s dark persona takeover. Negan starts boasting how great he feels firing the guns at zombies. Negan doesn’t seem like he’s mourning his wife Lucille’s death. Negan doesn’t seem to care about anything but survival. It reminds me of Rick’s breakdown that leads to the Ricktatorship in The Walking Dead TV series. Rick had people to help him out of his funk, Negan did not.
We’ve learned key details about Negan’s past, including the origin of his baseball bat. We now know Negan was once a high school gym teacher who bullied his students. We also know Negan was married to a woman named Lucille, who was diagnosed with a terminal illness. Negan took the news of his wife’s illness pretty hard because he felt incredibly guilty for being unfaithful to her. Negan decided to do everything he could to support his wife and said goodbye to his lover.
Unfortunately, Negan’s introduction to the zombie apocalypse was when his wife died. He witnessed his wife turn and had to kill two people in the hospital where she was a patient. Negan experienced a lot of loss in a short amount of time. The world was falling apart when his wife was dying, and there was nothing he could do about either situation.
You can’t fault the guy from embracing the darkness. What do you think about Negan’s backstory so far? Let us know in the comments below.
