Negan was presented in The Walking Dead Season 7 as an enigma who doesn’t really play by the rules. You never know how Negan will react in a situation, which gives him a lot of power over people. Still, we don’t really know how Negan got to be Negan , which is why The Walking Dead Season 8 should definitely feature some of his backstory.
[Warning: The Walking Dead spoilers ahead/ Stop reading if you don’t want to know what happens to Negan.]
As we learned in seven seasons of The Walking Dead , people will do anything to survive. Negan was no exception. In a one-off series featured in Image+ magazine, The Walking Dead creator Robert Kirkman slowly released details regarding Negan’s past. We learn he was a high school gym teacher who was an asshole to his students. Not in a mean way, but he sort of joked around as a way to toughen them up.
Negan was married to a woman named Lucille, but their relationship wasn’t doing so great. Negan was having an affair with an unnamed woman when he learned Lucille had cancer. Lucille knew Negan was having an affair, but she decided to stay with him. Negan was very loyal and attentive during her illness. Lucille died in the hospital as the zombie apocalypse was spreading. The first reanimated corpse Negan saw was that of his wife.
Yeah, that’ll fuck you up. Not only was Negan feeling incredibly guilty for being disloyal to Lucille, but he essentially had to watch her die twice. While in the hospital, Negan encounters a 13-year-old boy who saves him. Negan is a bit in shock and reverts to being the asshole gym teacher. The boy is confused by Negan’s rude and sarcastic behavior considering what happened to Lucille. Negan makes a sarcastic comment about life being all about sex, and the boy is even more confused.
Negan then has a heart-to-heart with the kid when he learns his age. Negan tells the boy to wait to have sex and makes an analogy to Moby Dick . The boy starts to get comfortable with Negan when a walker attacks him. Negan watches the boy get eaten alive by the walkers and becomes extremely angry.
Negan eventually found a group of guys to pass the time with. He lies about his past; no one knows about Lucille or the boy who saved his life. As the story goes on, Negan runs into more people -- including Dwight -- and loses more people. He’s like Rick in the sense that he was forced to take on the leadership role. People started to look up to him and he began to take the leadership role seriously. He wanted to prove to himself he can keep people alive. It probably goes back to losing the unnamed boy and Lucille in the hospital.
We also see Negan create the legendary baseball bat, Lucille. Negan was an asshole before the apocalypse, but he carries a lot of guilt. He feels the loss of every single person, even if he doesn’t show it. He becomes increasingly frustrated when people die because they didn’t listen to him.
All of this content from the comics would make an incredible Negan-centric episode in The Walking Dead Season 8. The show did a great job solidifying Negan as a villain, which they’ll need in the All Out War storyline. But Negan isn’t bad for the sake of being bad; he doesn’t want to lose control and there are complexities to his story. Take the Governor, for example. Like Negan,he wanted to protect his people. He believed his way was the only way of keeping people alive. We learn what the Governor lost and how he came to be. It would be great to see something like that for Negan, especially if the All Out War storyline ends the same way it did in the comics. In the end, Rick decides to imprison Negan rather than kill him.
Do you think The Walking Dead Season 8 should feature a Negan backstory episode? Let us know in the comments below. The Walking Dead Season 8 premieres this October on AMC.
