Before the series, there was a comic. Here is a small step aside in the world of zombies of Walking Dead with this limited series proposed by Delcourt.
It had all started so well…
Walking Dead is a phenomenon in comic book publishing. Apart from The Simpsons, this series is by far the best-selling comic book in France but this volume is different. We discover how Negan has gradually become the monster he is in The Walking Dead. This story is directed by the same artistic team as the main series: Robert Kirkman on the script and Charlie Adlard as illustrator. The style of Adlard, a little unfinished, so dirty and creepy, fits perfectly to this series monument of horror. The colorization in shades of gray makes it possible to represent more without going into the gore and to let the imagination of the reader be afraid.
The beginning is original for an American comic: Negan cheats on his wife but she knows it and accepts it. A sports teacher, he makes humiliating jokes at the expense of his students. Doctors discover a tumor in his wife and Negan decides to become a model husband helping his wife through every stage of her agony. He succeeds until she becomes a zombie at the beginning of the epidemic. Kirkman knows how to turn a banal narrative into horror in a few silent boxes.
Negan is a tender person at first. He blames himself for killing corpses and cannot kill his wife but we see traces of what he will be. He is already obsessed: life is for him a quest for fucking and makes vulgar jokes.
A dive into the psychology of a killer
Having to survive in a world that has become hell, Negan, like the negative man , transforms and gradually becomes a monster. He becomes ruthless when he sees his fellow travelers die fast. This former lover has forgotten his past, as a psychological protection, or refuses it by presenting himself as a lonely. Along the way, he finds a group and asserts himself as a leader. This new role unlocks his memories and he finds his past. Refusing rape, he wants to impose his morality. Along with these personality changes, the reader also discovers how he built his weapon: a baseball bat surrounded by barbed wire that becomes his symbolic phallus. The story ends with the completion of this weapon whose name comes from his wife, Lucille.
Negan and others
The first episode of this collection traces Negan's changes in different phases. Don't be fooled by the misleading title because, as the back cover explains, after a long episode about the brute with the bat, there are three short stories about the origins of other major characters: Michonne, Tyrese and the Governor.
If you want to know how civilization can collapse in a matter of days and turn an ordinary man into a brute, this post-apocalyptic tale is ideal for you. Negan is a good volume to start the series. It does not require to know everything. This distracting side narrative remains in the tone of the series.
