Meandering: The Walking Dead #105 Review

We’re a bunch of issues into the Negan Is A Douchebag arc in The Walking Dead, and I still don’t have that douchebag figured out yet.

I know a few people with some experience dealing with people on the autism spectrum (I know, I know: “Gee Rob, doesn’t everyone who knows you have experience dealing with at least one guy on the autism spectrum?” Yer a real fucking comedian, you are), and I’ve heard enough descriptions of missed social cues and inappropriate responses to interpersonal stimuli and the need for rigid routine to think that maybe writer Robert Kirkman intends for Negan to be rocking that kind of diagnosis… although everything I know about autism comes from secondhand anecdotes, Rainman and when people question my motivations.

But at the same time, I know a rotten, cowardly fucking bully when I see one, an I certainly see one in Negan. A big kid in arrested development who realized somewhere along the way that, since there’s no one to put the arm on him for telling racist jokes and flushing drunks heads down the toilet, why the hell not escalate to baseball bats and hot irons?  Maybe Negan’s just the kid who wedgied you in junior high who’s stuck in a state of arrested development, taking advantage of the fact that he maybe pinkbellied his first couple of “followers” into line, and the rest followed the pack.

Or maybe Kirkman has some combination of the two in mind; a character who never had the capacity to understand that just because a littler kid didn’t hit you back didn’t mean he was your friend, who thrives in a black-and-white set of simple rules that he suddenly found himself in a position to create on his own (no matter how much sense those rules might make), and whose pre-apocalypse personal obsession was zombie movies which made him better prepared to handle the rise of the walkers while we other social outcasts who were obsessed with, say, comic books, contributed to the rise of the new world order by becoming lunch.

Or maybe I’m completely full of shit, utterly off base, and have no idea what I’m talking about. And even if I am, who gives a damn? I don’t need the DSM-5 to know batshit crazy when I see it, and Negan is crazy. Regardless of his motivations (although clearly, this is the kind of thing that’s on my mind these days), this issue serves to show that, back at the ranch, Negan is at least as dangerous as the Governor, if not more so due to his obvious lack of real care for his people. He needs to die, already… and he has Carl.

This will not end well… and frankly, after six or seven months with this prick, I’m not sure it will end at all.

This issue is where we see Negan resplendent amongst his people… and the motherfucker is resplendent. Guy’s got a harem, people kneel when he walks in the door, and they play along with his shitty jokes like a bunch of Ed McMahons if Negan was holding the world’s last bottle of bourbon. He rules under a set of arbitrary rules – people work for points to earn supplies, with the exception of his “wives”… and if one of them cheats on him, the dude with the invading dick takes a hot iron to the face, no questions asked by anybody. And we see this all through the eyes of Carl, who Negan has captured after Carl stowed away with them with a machine gun and took out five or six of Negan’s people. Negan seems to have taken a certain fascination with Carl, particularly his gaping eye wound, but there is still a question as to what Negan plans to do with him.

This issue exists purely to show us more about Negan, his people and how they function. Up until now, he has been the outside Big Bad, who sweeps in, talks like a seven-year-old throwing dirt clods on the sidewalk, kills a longtime character or two, and then leaves. His formidability has been demonstrated through what he has accomplished against Rick and company, but he might as well have been some dude in a black hat, rolling into town, throwing pistols at the locals feet and sneering, “Go ahead: pick it up.”

So this issue is here to answer the question: is Negan this big a douchebag when he’s at home? And the answer is, of course, yes. The additional detail calls into question some of the possible reasons why Negan might be the way he is – see my earlier rambling about bullies and autism – which make the character somewhat more three-dimensional than he previously was… but make no mistake: this issue continues the recent trend of stinging out the action to make us hate Negan more so that when Rick and company roll in, it feels better when he is killed with his baseball bat Lucille (And make no mistake: he will be killed with that bat, possibly while muttering, “You picked a fine time to leave me, Lucille.”).

But where this issue ups the ante is by putting Carl in Negan’s hands, and how that will play out. Carl, being a kid, might be ripe for recruiting and / or brainwashing, assuming Negan’s smart enough to try that… but anything that might happen on that front is merely inferred by the reader. We see Negan telling Carl its okay to leer at Negan’s wives, and he punishes that “crime” of killing six of his people by making him sing a song to him (the leniency might appeal to a kid who’s already done a few murders)… but we also see Carl reacting badly to most of this. So my guess is that we’ll get at least one more issue of Negan trying to turn Carl, escalating to violence, and the Rick will roll in with the cavalry.

And therein lies the problem with the issue: while it shows us more about Negan, and it raises the stakes on the long-term story by putting Carl in danger, it still feels a bit like we’re marking time here. It feels like Kirkman is simply laying groundwork to make Negan more and more unlikeable for a more satisfying inevitable beatdown. And since historically, Kirkman’s story arcs have been around six issues (to better fit into the trade paperbacks), this one has been going on for months. It just feels slow, and it feels like we’re getting pages of character work that isn’t utterly necessary. Sure, it’s interesting to wonder why Negan is the way he is, but unless there’s some kind of plan to make him a recurring character, Kirkman firmly put the black hat on the guy five months ago when he killed Glenn; he’s a dick and we want to see him die, already! Let’s move it along!

Charlie Adlard’s art is so ubiquitous with The Walking Dead that there’s almost no need to address it; the man knows how to illustrate horror. There isn’t a single zombie in this issue, but Adlard is called upon to draw things ranging from a frightened child to a gaping and horrifying gunshot wound, to a dude getting his face burned off by an iron, and all of it shows solid emotion and is, when necessary, genuinely horrifying. And he draws Negan with a smug fucking face, that only truly lights up when he sees something really terrible, which helps the reader hate him and want to see him die even more.

In the final analysis, The Walking Dead #105 adds a certain amount of depth and question of motivation to Negan, and amps the long-term stakes by putting Carl into danger… but those positives are coming at the expense of pacing. Bottom line: this Negan story is slow. And what we are given here isn’t enough to slake my impatience to get to the damn point, already.

A wise man once said that a movie is too long for its own story when you start wishing for a cigarette halfway through. By this point in the Negan story, I’m ready to smoke a carton of Luckies… and I don’t even smoke anymore. This issue has some interesting character work in it, but I gotta recommend you skip it. Wait for the trade, when you can breeze through it and get to the savage beatings without delay.