"You pull your pud that slow, fuckwit?!
"GAME POINT!
"If I had a wrist that weak, I'd need three pictures of your mom to blow my load.
"Now which one of you little pricks is next?"
...
"Sorry, Coach Negan. Josh has always been kind of a pussy. I'll try to calm him down."
And so, the big secret is finally out!! Not the full story of Lucille, but we will get to that, rest assured. No, fans of the man we all love to hate have often pondered precisely what Negan did for a living back in the pre-apocalyptic world. The rumour for a while was that of used car salesman, which I could see, but actually, demented P.E. teacher makes far more sense.
In many ways, he does remind me of a certain junior school games teacher of mine called [REDACTED] who always seemed part-clown / part-concentration camp commandant. One minute he was laughing and joking with us all, the next dispensing immense knee grippers and one-eared full-body-lifts for no apparent reason whatsoever.
I do very vividly remember a certain incident as an eight year old when I got chewing gum stuck in my hair on a school trip and [REDACTED] took just a bit too much pleasure in cutting it out with the serrated blade on his Swiss Army knife. The glint in his eye as he approached me was probably how the cowboys felt when they were out of ammo and that fashionable new haircut that the Native American Indian barbers were offering free of charge beckoned. I should just be grateful he wasn't using a barbed-wire-encrusted baseball bat, I suppose!
I digress.
Fans of the WALKING DEAD will already have known that Negan's favourite skull pinyata smasher was named after his late wife. What we get in this collection of material that first appeared in the excellent Image Plus previews magazine (not in the regular comics), is the heartbreaking end of their marital story, pre-apocalypse, and then how Negan gradually evolved / devolved, depending on your point of view, into the chilling, <ahem> articulate dictator he then subsequently became.
He clearly always had the gags, having polished his material ad nauseam no doubt on his young wards, but was he always such a complete and utter dick, or did he once have a romantic homespun heart of gold? As ever, with the man we really, really do love to utterly despise, it will not surprise you to learn he was always, shall we say, a... complex character... with hidden, slightly odious depths.
As good as any regular WALKING DEAD arc, if you are a fan, you will want this, trust me. Yes, it's a little slim, and it has unfortunately been released as a hardcover first, thus being a different size to all those twenty eight trades you have on your shelves, but it is riveting, essential reading.
I have no idea whether the success of this arc will prove the spur to do any further prequel comics material featuring other significant characters. The Governor received his own similar treatment with the well received quadrilogy of prose novels, which are still available should anyone wish us to order them in. I can't say there is any real need for exploring the back stories of other characters, though I really wouldn't be adverse to volume two of Negan's...
