GOODNIGHT, FUCKERS #576: RIP NEGAN AND FRIENDS

 I was a fan of The Walking Dead for a long time before the show premiered. I knew the team of Kirkman and Moore before even the first issue came out. I was a huge fan of their previous book, Battle Pope, and at my first comics convention I bought a Battle Pope shirt off of them personally.

In case you're not familiar with Battle Pope

When I saw that they were putting a book out through Image about the zombie apocalypse, I got very jazzed. Bought it fresh off the press. The Walking Dead #1. I eventually got it signed by Kirkman and Moore. This was in the days just before the show started. Kirkman was easy to get. He wasn't even on the list of guests. He was just hanging out at the Image booth. I got to talk to him while waiting in line for Moore, who had been on the guest list. Our talk went so well that he gave me volume one of the Invincible omnibus for free. That's a hell of an expensive book, but it paid off. I got all the others in the series, too. Moore was a lot harder to get, and that's a story for another day because this isn't about the comics.

It's about the show. I remember when the first episode aired. It was a double episode, if I recall. I made it very clear to my girlfriend at the time that no matter what we did it would involve watching The Walking Dead. So we did. I loved the hell out of it, and after getting fabulously drunk and having lots of sex, we both passed out only to be woken up in the middle of the night by the replay. Specifically by the car alarm scene because I'd left the TV blaring when we passed out.

But after that first season the show had its ups and downs. A lot more downs than I would have hoped for. It got to the point where I was baffled by the writers because they weren't doing anything cohesive with this. If they found an opportunity to make a tangent, they would do so and follow it until they had no choice but to go back to the story. They lacked focus. But every once in a while they fired on all cylinders, and that kept me engaged.

And then they introduced Negan. They handled the end of his first episode poorly. His second went pretty well when he out-Neganed the comics Negan by killing Abraham and Glenn. That was pretty sweet. But Rick and his crew kept descending into madness and stupidity until I reached the point where I thought FUCK THEM. I want Negan to kill them all and take over the show.

And so Negan and Friends was born. And when I got tired of Fear the Walking Dead, I started calling it Where's Negan and Friends? But then it got really good and I started calling it The Adventures of Victor Strand in the Nuclear Zombie Apocalypse. And now it's going to be stupid again, so it's back to Where's Negan and Friends?

They really should have called Dead City Negan Lives, but what the hell. It will probably get bogged down by Maggie's bullshit, so I'm calling it Negan and Friend. The Daryl Dixon show? I won't bother. Maybe it will be Friend of Negan? Don't even ask me about the Rick and Michonne one. I have the least interest in that one unless Rick and Michonne die horribly in the first episode. It could be called Negan and Friends: Pee-Pee Pants City.

World Beyond? What's that?

PS:

PSS: This always makes me laugh.

GOODNIGHT, FUCKERS #510: REDEMPTION

The true hero of The Walking Dead

 

I'm a sucker for a great redemption story. The farther a villain goes, the better before they try to bring themselves back to humanity. The purest form of it that we're going through right now is Negan on The Walking Dead. He brutally and graphically murdered the second most beloved character on the show, and now that he's seen the error of his ways, he's trying to be a good man. To say nothing of poor Abraham. No one remembers that part. Everyone cares about their sacred baby Glenn.

So I've adopted the same stance through much of my writing. I'm bringing Dong of Frankenstein back into print, hopefully before the year is done, and it will be accompanied by other out of print stories. One of them is "Zero Recall," in which I detail the crimes of a horrible rapist/murderer, and yet I somehow bring him back from the brink to the point where people who have read the story feel bad for him. I'm doing this on a much grander scale with my forthcoming SF novel, Eye Cutter. You'll see what I mean when it's released.

So I found myself wondering a while back why that kind of story is so interesting to me, and when I was preparing my piece on why people hate the Star Wars prequels, I figured it out.

Darth Vader has done a lot of horrible things, up to and including the murder of children. Does he deserve redemption? Maybe. Just maybe. Because he fell under the sway of someone far more evil than he. Many of the things he did were done because he truly didn't understand the situation. It was easy for Palpatine to manipulate him into becoming the ghastly thing known as Darth Vader.

Who sees this possibility of redemption? His son. Luke tries to save his father, and holy shit, it actually works. (Spoiler.) It works to the point where Vader saves his son's life at the cost of his own and kills Palpatine. Yes. Kills Palpatine. Because that guy never comes back. Ever. If they made a ninth Star War, he absolutely, most certainly wouldn't come back as the villain because Vader definitively kills him in Return of the Jedi. Permanently.

The end of Return of the Jedi infected me with a joy in this kind of redemption arc. I can safely say that it changed my life. Because I've done some pretty bad things over the course of my life. I've said vile shit that I shouldn't have. And I'm trying to be a better person every day. If someone like Darth Vader can come back from the evil he committed, then my own redemption should be a breeze.

Taking it like a champ!

OK, some of you think Rick should have let Negan die when he slit his throat. And yeah, Negan did some bad shit, too. But think about why you like Rick and hate Negan. I call Negan the hero of the show because at least he has no illusions about himself. Rick and friends are absolutely delusional in thinking they're the good guys. If you hadn't spent so many seasons with Rick and Daryl and Glenn and T-Dog (RIP, you sweet bastard) and the rest, and the characters you followed for all those seasons instead ran into Rick and Co., you would recognize them as the morally bankrupt pieces of shit they really are. Negan said that his only regret, when he killed Glenn AND ABRAHAM, is that he didn't just kill all of them. I was kinda hoping he would. Hence the reason I call TWD Negan and Friends.

Also, when Negan comes to realize what a bad guy he really is, he genuinely feels bad about the horrible things he'd done. Can you imagine, even on Rick's most optimistic day, that Rick would ever even think about doubting himself?