10 Years Ago, The Walking Dead Broke Its Own Rules For a Single Issue (And Made History)

In every Look Back, we examine a comic book issue from 10/25/50 years ago (plus a wild card every month with a fifth week in it). This time around, we head to June 2015 for a look at an unusually dark issue of The Walking Dead.

As an aside, as we move away from the traditional "Golden Age" of comics from 75 years ago (as we're now well into 1950), I have decided to mix things up with Look Back going forward. Instead of a regular "75 years ago" entry, I will rotate the fourth entry between 10, 25 and 50 years ago, whichever year has the most interesting options (as it really IS a shame sometimes to pass up, say, the final issue of Morrison and Porter's JLA to spotlight the first issue of Bendis and Omeing's Powers, which I had to do earlier this year). If I have a really good hook for a 75th anniversary in any given month, I'll still do it, but, well, come on, as you've seen from some recent entries, the pickings are fairly slim for notable entries for some months 75 years ago (like the "Robin and Superman were both turned gold in the same month" month last June).

One of the things that Robert Kirkman most wanted to do with The Walking Dead was to have it so that readers legitimately couldn't tell what would happen next, because it was a book where a major character truly COULD die at any moment. Kirkman was intentionally ruthless with the cast, famously killing off fan favorite Glenn in The Walking Dead #100, and eventually killing off most of the main characters, including, of course, Rick Grimes, in the final story of the series. Kirkman even noted, when discussing Glenn's death (when The Walking Dead Deluxe reached #100) last year, that he had "a solid plan for constantly making the reader think characters were goners," but he felt he telegraphed Glenn's death too much, and as he notes, "it could have been way better if I landed those moments."

As a rule, Kirkman typically gave characters' death some room to breathe. The issue with the single-most MAIN character deaths was The Walking Dead #48, but that was a clear-cut "battle" issue, so it made sense that multiple people would die, and even there, Kirkman noted that that was not his original intent, as he planned to kill Lori and Judith Grimes off an issue earlier, but changed the plot as he went, which, as he noted, "it made it to where most of the deaths in this arc took place in one issue—which wasn't originally the plan." Now, an issue where the PLAN was for a lot of characters to die at once was in July 2015's The Walking Dead #115, by Kirkman, Charlie Adlard, Stefano Gaudiano, Cliff Rathburn, and Rus Wooton, which was a shocking turn of events.

What was the setup of the shocking twist in The Walking Dead #144?

In The Walking Dead #132, two members of The Hilltop Colony (one of the main settlements of humans that we had been following in The Walking Dead at the time. The other one was Alexandria) are sent to go find a missing member of the colony, and they are seemingly attacked by "Walkers" (the comic book term for zombies) with KNIVES!!! Of course, that's when they discover that what they THINK are walkers are actually people wearing the skin of walkers and essentially living amongst the walkers. This group is called The Whisperers, and their leader is named Alpha. Well, Alpha's daughter, Lydia, is taken prisoner after some more Whisperers attack other Hilltop residents.

Lydia and Rick Grimes' son, Carl, soon develop a strong friendship. Alpha wants her daughter back, of course, and she works out a trade with Maggie (the residents she took captive for her daughter). Carl, though, follows them to their camp. Alpha then infiltrates Alexandria (without her zombie skinsuit), and eventually takes Rick to the camp, and that's where she reveals that she has a massive herd of Walkers that she can unleash on Alexandria and Hilltop if she so chooses, so she tells Rick to leave her and the Whisperers alone...

However, after learning that Whisperer "society" involves Lydia being repeatedly raped, Rick is outraged. Alpha decides to let Lydia leave with Rick and Carl, while feigning that she is "punishing" her daughter...

Okay, things seem like they're resolving OKAY, but...

What was the shocking border created in The Walking Dead #144?

As they leave, Alpha tells Rick that she has created a border that she doesn't want any of Rick's people (or the Hilltop Colonists) to cross.

We are then stunned to see that the border is marked by the heads of innocent people, including TWELVE cast members from the series!

The characters are MOSTLY minor ones, but there are a few notable ones, including Rosita, who had been around for almost 60 issues at that point, and, of course, the big one was Ezekiel, head of the community known as The Kingdom, who was a major character in the book at the time...

Adlard and Gaudiano draw the HELL out of this sequence, and Kirkman cleverly has the reveal of each dead person marked with a scene back at that character's home where people are wondering where they are.

The twelve dead cast members are Olivia, Josh, Carson, Tammy, Luke, Erin, Ken, Amber, Larry, Oscar, Rosita and Ezekiel.

The Walking Dead "omnibuses" were split into 48 issue groups, so this marked the end of the third omnibus, and what an ending it was! Naturally, this was very much NOT the end of the whole Whisperers conflagration, but that's a story for another day...