Negan, as he appears in the comics, is an alpha male’s worst nightmare: he renders Rick helpless, catching him unaware and stripping him of the things that give him agency, all while being shorter and stockier than Rick. Truly feminine characters, like Andrea and Beth, don’t last long in The Walking Dead’s world. On the show, Michonne acts as muscle, much like Daryl and Carol uses her feminine, elderly appearance to carry out espionage for Rick. Most prominently, the episode ended without a real conclusion: we won’t know who Negan beat to death with Lucille until the show returns for a seventh season.Īlright, alright, we get it, you want to rape all the men in the group.Īlthough the show has done some work in femininity, particularly shaping both Michonne and Carol, both characters are made more powerful by appealing to, and becoming useful to, their male counterparts.
Last night’s Walking Dead frustrated comic book fans in more ways than one. His presence in The Walking Dead is especially potent and shocking because the entire franchise is a masculine survival fantasy. Negan is disturbing because he’s a nightmare to straight, powerful men. Negan isn’t frightening because he kills characters - that much we’re all used to, since it’s a show about the zombie apocalypse.
RICK THE WALKING DEAD COMICS SERIES
In order to truly pinpoint Negan’s influence, on both the comic series and the television show, we have to take a look at The Walking Dead’s ever-present anxious masculinity. Negan vs Rick is just a violent dick-size contest, and in the comics, Glenn gets his skull crushed to pieces because Rick just doesn’t measure up. Much has been said already about Negan’s profanity, and his phallic obsession with his barbed-wire-bound baseball bat, Lucille. Much of his dialogue matched his lines from the first comic issue in which he appears, The Walking Dead, issue 100, but a few choice threats made in that book - including the one where he tells Rick he hopes to “slide his dick down his throat” - were cut from the broadcast. For better or worse, Negan finally debuted on Walking Dead in last night’s finale.
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