[WARNING: Spoilers from events inThe Walking Deadcomic to follow.
These may or may not correspond to what ends up happening on the TV version ofThe Walking Dead.
Proceed at your own risk.]
Credit: Charlie Adlard/Skybound/Image Comics
BringingThe Walking Deads ultimate comic-book villain to the screen is not without its challenges.
ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: Weve seen lots of bad guys on this show before.
To someone who hasnt read the comics, what makes Negan different from all of them?
He is a singular character, I think, of the last 10 to 20 years of popular culture.
I find him to be a fascinating character.
Through another lens, hes not a bad guy at all in the comic.
He does some horrible things, butourpeople do some horrible things.
He is, though, this unrepentant a-hole.
He is somebody who is the ultimate bully.
And a bully with a bat, no less.
That was the worst because the bullies that were funny were show people.
Im not going to say show men because there are a lot of girl bullies in school, too.
They were funny and yet they were awful.
Thats such a combination.
And Negan is the ultimate version of that bully.
And he is an incredible strategist.
He can often appear capricious.
He is pure id.
He is this force of nature.
I think Negan is the villain that you hate to love.
But you just love him.
And he does some horrible things, but he has a reason for them.
Hes not a psychopath, and in some ways, he has this bizarre sort of empathy to him.
But he does reason things out.
He isnt just some psychopath.
Hes such an enjoyable character to read.
Hes been an enjoyable character to write, although a lot of it is Roberts writing from the book.
I would just say you havent seen anything like him onThe Walking Dead.
Yeah, or anywhere for that matter.
Hes going to terrify you but hes really going to make you laugh.
A lot of the times youre going to be ashamed that youre laughing.
Well, thats why you cast the Comedian [fromWatchmen], I assume.
So what is it that made you want to introduce him this season?
It really just came down to that.
Im curious in terms of the conversations you guys had in terms of approaching it.
Do we handle this faithfully?
Do we do a remix and change it up?
Thats always going to be relatively subjective as to what that means.
So will it be different?
Will it be the same thing?
So much of the changes of what we do in the comic have to do with that.
Sometimes things happen to completely different characters.
It wasnt Lizzie who killed Mika.
Carl was the one involved that story when it was Billy and Ben.
