The creator of The Walking Dead never expected Negan to appear … – Digital Spy

It's safe to say that Negan is quite an outlandish character from the Walking Dead comics.

Well, creator Robert Kirkman has revealed that he didn't expect Jeffrey Dean Morgan's terrifying villain to even be adapted for the TV series.

Although the TV show has remained pretty faithful to the comics, Kirkman said that he expected it to deviate from the comics a lot more by the time they reached season seven.

AMC

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"A lot of the things that are adapted into the show now are things that happened to come in after the existence of the show, and I can't help but notice that there is some kind of difference," he said at Emerald City Comic-Con (via CBR.com).

"Now you've got Ezekiel walking around, acting like a lunatic. Negan's walking around in the comic, he's dropping the F-word every two seconds and that's something you can't do on the show.

"We've got a freakin' tiger that's in the show now."

Gene Page / AMC

Kirkman continued: "That was clearly me going, 'they're never going to get to this stuff, and if they do get to this stuff, they're never going to be able to adapt it, so I'm just going hog-wild.

"I had to prove myself internally that I was not changing what I was planning to do with a mind towards how we were going to adapt it when we got there on the show.

"I went so overboard that I think it did change in the comic in some way but I feel like it made it more awesome."

This week's episode 'Say Yes' saw Rick continue in his mission to build an army against Negan's Saviors.

Gene Page/AMC

It's all building up to what will surely be a must-watch season finale and executive producer Greg Nicotero has promised huge things ahead.

"It was a blast to shoot, and we all went on pure adrenaline and pure instinct," he said, talking about episode 16. "And it was really, really a great experience."

The Walking Dead continues tonight (March 6) at 9pm on FOX in the UK, and on Sunday (March 12) on AMC in the US.

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The creator of The Walking Dead never expected Negan to appear ... - Digital Spy