What Makes The Walking Dead's Villains So Good? The Depressing Answer Will Hurt You

Image Comics’ The Walking Dead is populated by dozens of multilayered characters, both heroic and villainous, with the series' bad guys being some of the most vile human beings in all of comics. But why are The Walking Dead’s villains so much better compared to others? The answer lies in a shared hardship that none can escape.

Making its debut over 20 years ago in 2003, The Walking Dead, by Robert Kirkman, Tony Moore, and Charlie Adlard, was an immediate hit that helped repopularize zombies in the public eye, with the multimedia franchise that was birthed from the original series ensuring that no fan will go without new Walking Dead content for long.

Receiving a few specials, one-shots, and spinoffs over the years, the world of Walking Dead recently concluded its young adult graphic novel series Clementine, by Tillie Walden, with a recent Popverse interview with this talented writer/artist shedding light on why Walking Dead villains are so great: they’ve all been traumatized in some way by the “suffering” they’ve experienced.

The Walking Dead Universe Has So Many Great Villains Because of Their Personal Suffering

According to Clementine writer Tillie Walden

Speaking about the concluding chapter of her Clementine trilogy, a story that follows the continued exploits of Clementine, the main character from Telltale Games’ The Walking Dead video game series, Walden explains how Book 2’s Miss Morro and Book 3’s The Gardener are characters whose villainy sprouted from a rather depressing place.

Revealing how she wanted to understand “what drives people to do harmful things," Walden explains how her relationship with her mother and her experiences with “girls who bullied me” shaped her Clementine villains, with the pain they caused Walden being "so much worse because they themselves are suffering so deeply,” even adding that it’s “understandable,” and “makes so much sense.”

Saying how she doesn’t know how to write “an evil guy beating people up” and how taking that route is creatively “a dead end,” Walden hones in on what makes an iconic antagonist work, with the idea of a villain's suffering and the way they deal with it being a huge reason why evil in The Walking Dead is so dangerous.

Continuing, Walden explains that when it came to writing characters like Miss Morro and The Gardener, she centered on “the female experience” and “female experiences as we age,” with the way people torment themselves and others as they grow older, telling fans exactly why these specific Walking Dead antagonists feel so different and richly textured as compared to most.

Most of the Walking Dead’s Villains Are Tortured Souls Who Can’t or Won’t Save Themselves

The Walking Dead’s Flesh-Eating Zombies Included

Whether having a particularly rough life, being physically, mentally, or emotionally damaged beyond repair, or simply not knowing how to deal with trauma that has utterly broken them, Walking Dead villains are layered people whose suffering has led them to dark places where they sink further and further until there is no light left.

Walden notes how no one sets out to be a bad person, with villains like The Governor and his twisted love for his zombie daughter, Negan and his tragic past with his late wife, Lucille, Clementine’s Miss Morro and Gardener, and even the ever-constant zombie hordes all being examples of suffering personified.

So while the original Robert Kirkman-penned series has long since ended its record-breaking comic run, creators like Clementine's Tillie Walden are continuing to expand The Walking Dead’s universe in meaningful ways by introducing all-new villains whose personal trauma has turned them into the kind of tragic characters worthy of this harrowing undead world.