The Walking Dead Return: 3 Crucial Times the Show Deviated from the Comics

Still, not impossible: I ruined something last season, for example, when they introduced Eugene, and I blurted that his whole “zombie cure” thing was so much bunk. That Eugene and his motivations transferred intact (at least in the beginning) from comic to show was something of an anomaly. What I find most interesting are the instances where events are taken straight from the comics, but happen to entirely different characters on the show—these changes to situation and import cast often dire ethical choices in an entirely new light. Just because the same things occasionally happen on page and screen, doesn’t mean their meaning the same.
With the sixth season underway and third compendium of graphic novels out tomorrow, The Walking Dead has given us a lot of space for comparison. Here are three instances where the same thing happened in both formats—but in very different ways.
The problem of Shane
The death of Shane plays out almost in mirror image in the comic and on the show. In the comic, Carl shoots Shane in the neck as he’s threatening Rick. Shane is then buried, and everyone moves on. When Rick learns that anyone will turn, not just bitten people, he returns to Shane’s grave and puts him out of his misery. Shane survives much longer on the show—long enough to enact a whole arc of madness and megalomania. Rick gut stabs an unhinged Shane, and a confused Carl comes upon the tableau of his father standing over Shane’s corpse. He raises his gun as Rick stutters out his reasons, long enough for you to worry he’s going to off his old man. He instead shoots the now zombified Shane behind Rick; phew.
What’s interesting about this shift is how early Carl kills his first living human in the comics—well before his TV version, and before his dad does in either incarnation. In both, Carl often acts as a foil to Rick’s possibly antique notions of honor and society, but the television Carl seems more sheltered by his father, often in ways that seem dangerous. The comic book version is a kid whose brutal pragmatism is tailored to the only world he understands. (More on this later.) When Rick kills Shane on the television series, with an intimate, almost embracing stabbing, it marks the real death of his naiveté. That Carl does it in the comic lets Rick linger longer in the dream of a lost world.

Parceling out Dale
Dale dies a lot earlier on the show, tripped up by a walker on Hershel’s farm. In the comic, he’s romantically linked with Andrea pretty early on, and his anxiety about their age difference drives a fair amount of domestic conflict. There is a lot more domestic conflict in the comic—love affairs, squabbles, improvised families, even a murder mystery or two—than there is on television. I think this plays to the strengths of the different media: no black and white comic will be able to pull off the show’s gloriously grisly set pieces with quite the same impact. As visual as a comic is, it’s just not as visceral as the moving image.
With Dale gone early, two big events that happen to him in the comic happen to other characters on the show: losing his leg in the prison, and being eaten by cannibals. In the series, it’s Hershel that is bitten by a walker in the leg, but it is still Rick’s quick hand with a hatchet that saves his life with amputation. There really isn’t more to this event than that, other than to underline the similar space Hershel and Dale occupy: they both act as moral compass to Rick. The cannibal sequence, now, that is where things get interesting.
In the comic, Dale is bitten in the midst of some fairly intense conflicts with Rick about his leadership, and the loss of an adopted son. He’s always been unsure of the strength of his relationship with the much younger Andrea, and decided to spare her the pain of his turning by removing himself to die alone. He’s captured by the Hunters, who are roughly analogous to the cannibals of Terminus. He wakes up to them eating his other leg, but the joke’s on them: he’s infected. They beat him and return him to the group, where Andrea is able to pour out her very real feelings for him before his death.
On the show, it’s Sasha’s love interest and recovering alcoholic Bob who is bitten on a supply run, not long after they escape from the nightmare at Terminus. He’s then captured by the Terminus people, and events play out very similarly as with Dale, but with very different implications. Despite his struggles with addiction (or possibly because of them), Bob acts as this force of optimism and cheer in the group. His flirtatious game of finding the bright side of any horrible thing Sasha thinks up as they walk down the tracks, for example, is bright moment in a very dark world.
Dale’s death comes at the end of some real uncertainty in his life, but his reconciliation with Andrea right before the end feels like a tragically affecting coda, a movement towards a kind of peace. He dies understanding he and Andrea did truly love each other. Bob’s death is a whole other situation for Sasha—he remains true to his optimism up until the end, but because their relationship was so much more fledgling, his death knocks her for a loop. Instead of being a real intimacy that she can grieve, Bob’s death seems to be the death of optimism itself. That’s some hard stuff, and sends Sasha down a dark path.

Look at the flowers
In the comics, Dale and Andrea adopt a pair of brothers when their parents die, much like Carol and Tyreese take over the care of a pair of sisters after the prison is breached. In both instances, the older of the siblings appears to be a psychopath, torturing animals and espousing alarming beliefs about the nature of the undead. Both older siblings kill the younger, throwing the adults into crisis: how do you deal with damaged, murderous children in a world that is decidedly lacking in mental health services, or a criminal justice system? The boy is locked up, in the comic, while the grownups debate. Taking the situation into his own brutally pragmatic hands, Carl secretly kills the boy. On the show, Carol and Tyreese have a wordless conversation, and Carol shoots the girl after telling her to look at the flowers. “She can’t be around other people,” Carol says over and over, justifying to herself.
There’s a lot going on with these differences. Comics’ Carl continues to make the hard choices he believes the older generation is incapable of, though we will never know what the adults would have decided. In a strange way, he’s allowing them their fantasies of society by acting outside of it. Carl’s killing of the boy is much more deliberate than his shooting of Shane, but it’s born out of the same apocalyptic pragmatism, a form of pragmatism that can’t allow the almost fanciful psychosis of the murderous brother. Shane was an immediate threat. The boy was a more long-term one, but the threat was inevitable, and Carl made the equally inevitable choice.
When I first started thinking about the differences in these two scenarios, I thought Carol was the actor here, but now I realize it’s more about Tyreese. Carol, also, has a kind of pragmatism: she killed Tyreese’s love interest, Karen, and another man in the prison, because she thought they were going to die and then turn. She’s been secretly tutoring the kids in weapons and survival. She’s going to make that hard choice, despite her lingering guilt. Tyreese was devastated when Karen died, and has been going through his own crisis of killing. He tries really hard to find a solution, but every possibility ends in death. She can’t be around other people. Once Carol kills the girl, Tyreese and Carol discuss Karen’s death, and the brutal, ambiguous choices made in this walking life.
What differences between the comics and the series seem most significant to you?