Why does the Governor keep his daughter

Living... in the abandoned town of Woodbury with a few loyal followers. Why are they so loyal? Well, if they hold him back, they’ve got a bullet coming their way. The Governor loves power and has no time for anyone, alive or undead, to get in his way.

Profession... Governor, leader, iron fist wielder. He saw the apocalypse as an opportunity, and his magnetic personality drew people to him who were looking for hope in a bleak environment. But once they joined him in Woodbury, glimpses of his volatile nature came out. But who would be brave enough to rise up against him? It might be safer to just stay by his side.

Relationship Status... widower, though unlike many of his followers, his wife died before the outbreak. He keeps his past as mysterious as possible, never letting anyone in to see a vulnerable side of his personality. All he has from that relationship is his daughter Penny, but she’s not in great shape…

Challenge... keeping his daughter Penny as close to human as possible. She was bitten and is currently a walker, but he keeps her in a closet and brushes her hair, hoping one day he’ll be able to cure her. But his other challenge hopes he never gets to see that day – Rick and his group want to overthrow his reign. It’s their only hope of staying alive.

Personality... manipulative and power-hungry. He’s violent, aggressive and completely remorseless in his actions. Any sanity The Governor had before the apocalypse is long gone, and now he poses just as much a threat to those around him as the walkers he claims to protect them from. 

The Governor has always been a disgusting, irrevocably twisted sadist in either incarnation of his character. However, the comic Governor is just that much more sickening.

As we know from the show, his daughter was turned into a walker and he now keeps her chained up in some sick pseudo father daughter relationship fantasy he plays out to avoid the reality of his child’s death.

In the comics their relationship takes on a more sinister dimension. We find the Governor pulling out his walker daughter’s teeth. He then bends down and kisses her open mouth in an unambiguously sexual manor. To compound this, he spits afterwards and mutters about how he will have to get used to the taste.

If that doesn’t get your stomach churning then nothing will.

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Instead of his sister, Sasha, Tyreese enters the comic with his teenage daughter Julie and her boyfriend Chris. Chris had read Romeo and Juliet one too many times and decided the only way to be with the love of his life in this apocalyptic hell was a suicide pact.

Despite being pressured in to it, Julie agrees with Chris’ plan and, after making love for the first time, the star-crossed lovers drew their pistols. Like Romeo and Juliet, one lover ends up dead and the other heartbroken. Chris’ gun went off too early and he killed Julie.

Even more heartbreaking, Tyreese heard the shot and was the first to stumble upon his daughter’s dead body. He held her in his arms when she came back as a walker. Tyreese held his daughter and begged her to come back to life, even as she tried to bite his throat out, only for Chris to put the final bullet in Julie’s head.

Tyreese then snapped screaming, ‘What did you do? What did you do to my little girl?” before killing Chris and then brutally killing his reanimated corpse. Poor Tyreese.

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In the TV show, the harrowing story Lizzie and Mika largely plays analogous to the story of twin boys Ben and Billy. Ben and Billy are five-year-old twins who witness their mother’s death at the hands of walkers, and it leaves them emotionally traumatised.

Ben suffers especially deep psychological trauma and begins to exhibit signs of psychopathy. Eventually he ends up butchering his twin brother, Billy, and tells the adults it’s okay because everyone comes back. The adults, undecided on what they should do with Ben, lock him up in the van overnight.

In the show Carol kills Lizzie, but the comics are not so kind. While the adults are debating what to do with the murderous Ben, comic Carl sneaks in to his prison and shoots the young boy point blank. Children killing children is horrifying, and watching little Carl take it upon himself to execute a five-year-old to protect the rest of the camp is sickening.

It was moments like this early in the comic’s run that really made readers feel uneasy, but it was almost impossible to look away from the unfolding horror.

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The Whisperers have gained a lot of traction and excitement amongst the TV audience for justifiable reasons: they are a horrifying evolution of the human plague. Dressed in the skins of walkers and denying their human attributes, the Whisperers are a terrifying image of where humanity might end up.

Twisted leader Alpha shows just how bottomless the well of sadism is when, under the banner of peace, she infiltrates and begins to pick off our survivors one by one. Back at the Whisperer Camp she meets Rick and goes for a nice little stroll with him to discuss terms.

Here, she makes it clear that if the people of Alexandria stay on their side of the demarcated lines then her people will stay out of their territory. Sounds perfectly reasonable so far.

How did Alpha demarcate the borders? With the heads of Rick’s friends, of course. The people that Alpha had slaughtered were now stuck on sticks all along the border, including the pregnant Rosita and long-time favourite Ezekiel.

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Dale was probably too good to survive in this horrific zombie world, but that did not make his death any less shocking. Again, this moment was so horrifying because it plumbed new depths of depravity for a series that was only really getting started.

Dale was captured by a group of humans and woke to the smell of delicious meat… only, that meat ended up being his own. This group of survivors had become cannibals and had chopped off Dale’s one remaining leg and nonchalantly ate it in front of him, with the plan being to keep him alive for as long as possible and dissect pieces of him to eat.

Now the kicker - Dale had been bitten and was slowly dying from the walker infection. A point he took great pleasure in telling the cannibals as they feasted on his tainted flesh. They proceeded to beat Dale half to death and left him to die where he was.

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Rick Grimes strayed the line between hero and villain many times throughout the series. Most of the time he had just enough shreds of morality and justifiable violence to keep him on the heroic side of that line. His vengeance for the murder and cannibalisation of Dale, however, might have been the first time we saw Rick stray just too far across that line.

After Dale had his leg eaten and is left for dead, Rick swears bloody vengeance. He finds the pathetic rag tag group known as The Hunters and after words are exchanged and bullets are fired, our hero Rick Grimes tortures The Hunters all night.

Rick enjoyed his violent, medieval retribution. The panels in the comic became genuinely disturbing at points.

There was no moral justification for this act. They should have just killed The Hunters and made their environment just a little bit safer. The act of torturing them put Rick in the exact same category as Negan and The Governor.

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A major difference between comic Hershel and TV Hershel is that he had more children in the comic, including twin girls Rachel and Susie. After arriving at the prison under acrimonious circumstances, Hershel settles in with the community and things looks to be improving.

That is until Hershel takes his eyes off his twin daughters. Realising he has not seen them for a while, he goes looking around the prison grounds for them. That is when he stumbles upon their decapitated bodies. In shock Hershel and Maggie, who arrived shortly after him, watched as the dead girls’ heads reanimated and had to be put down by Glen.

One of the inmates in the prison turned out to be a psychopathic serial killer obsessed with decapitating people, and had murdered the two girls and planned to keep going.

Just the visual of two sweet innocent girls beheaded would have been shocking enough, but this was also the first time that the survivors had come across human savagery. Up until this point the walkers had been the biggest threat to them. Now they faced a new evil - a human evil, and it left fans unsure of who to trust or how to even understand why someone would do this.

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Was it Negan, Alpha, Or one of the other dozen or so villains Rick Grimes has tangled with over the years? No… it was a snot nosed brat called Sebastian who petulantly killed Rick for ruining the comfort and ease he had been enjoying in the Commonwealth.

Sebastian is the son of Pamela Milton, who had placed herself as Governor of the Commonwealth, an Ohio-based camp of survivors. He was a spoiled brat who bullies and throws tantrums when he cannot have his own way and revelled in the power his mother wields. That all changed when Rick arrived and eventually dethroned Pamela, thereby spoiling everything for Sebastian.

Sebastian then broke in to Rick’s home, and after confronting him for ruining his life, he shot Rick point blank in the chest. That’s right, Rick Grimes was killed by a petulant brat having a temper tantrum who had only been introduced less than twenty issues earlier.

To say this was shocking is an understatement. After everything Rick had survived and how close he had come to seeing democracy and peace, his life was ended in such a throwaway manner.

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The Walking Dead comics have finally drawn to a close after a whopping 192 issues. They ended in what might be the most shocking way this story could have - with a happy ending.

Carl is all grown up and has a daughter of his own. The walkers still exist but are no longer a threat to civilisation. Democracy and order are in place and the world has begun to move on. There is even a statue of Rick erected in the town square.

In fact, the whole thing wraps up with Carl taking his daughter, named Andrea after his beloved step mother, and reading her a bed time story about the trials Rick Grimes faced in bringing peace and love back to the world.

After all the horror, depravity and wickedness, there are few who would have thought The Walking Dead would end with such a touching heartfelt moment in which one of our main characters had found long lasting peace and hope. What could be more shocking than that?

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In most post-apocalyptic pieces of fiction, fans are invited to place themselves into the protagonist’s shoes, and it's fair to say that many believe they would survive and be just peachy. The Walking Dead leaves no one under any such illusion.

Instead, Robert Kirkman’s shocking gore-fest leaves fans emotionally and psychologically in tatters as they witness almost endless depravity and brutality befall the protagonists with frightening regularity.

While some of you may think the show adapted the darkest and most shocking moments of Kirkman’s comics, you would be mistaken. Some shocking moments have been altered, some have been watered down and others completely omitted.

It was a series almost completely built off the idea that no one was safe, and the fact it's continued to shock readers at nearly 200-issues-long is no easy feat. It's what's cemented the comic as being such an iconic part of the industry landscape for the last decade, aided in part by the monumental success of AMC's TV show, as well as Telltale's The Walking Dead video games.

There are MAJOR SPOILERS from now on, so if you're still reading Kirkman's comic and don't want any spoilers, best look away now...

The Governor was TWD's first human antagonist and Kirkman did not hold back, displaying all the sickest human tendencies the survivors would face in this new apocalyptic world. After capturing Rick and Michonne the Governor begins to carry out perverse mental and physical torture on them for his own amusement.

In the show it is hinted that the Governor will rape Andrea, but in the comic he doesn’t just tease it, he does it. After sadistically torturing Michonne the Governor proceeds to rape her for information on their settlement.

While this is sick, the Governor ratchets up the sadism even further by then forcing Glen in to the cell next to Michonne, where he then rapes and tortures her again, forcing Glen to listen to every horrifying moment of it.

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The panel used to convey this moment shows a shocked Carl with a massive bullet hole where his eye was.

While most characters are shown to be expendable, there is a core group that you fool yourself in to believing are safe. When Carl was shot in the chaos of walkers invading Alexandria, fans were left on tender hooks wondering if Kirkman's evil world had finally taken Carl.

Carl survives and, like his father, is left irrevocably changed by losing his eye. Kirkman does such a fantastic job of creating moments that permanently alter his narratives and characters and shows iron grit and bravery to follow through with his decisions, regardless of what narrative difficulties they create.

Kirkman would never do ‘it was all a dream’. Instead, his writing is more like a protracted nightmare where things can - and do - only get worse.

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Up to this point Rick, much like Jaime Lannister, had been shown to be a capable physical force who could defend himself and his family. However, after his first meeting with the Governor, Rick’s right hand is cut off in a display of power. The moment happens so fast with very little build up and felt like a gut punch when it was over.

Now readers faced the prospect of an injured protagonist in a world where he had only survived so far due to his strength and gunplay. This was a terrifying reality for fans who had fallen in love with Rick Grimes, and now it felt like it was only a matter of time till the walkers got him.

This was a moment that continued to reverberate through the narrative as Rick had to learn how to survive without his preferred hand and relearn all the things that once came so easily to him.

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While TV Lori Grimes was, understandably, reviled by fans for her selfish behaviour, comics Lori was an infinitely more likeable character. While she did sleep with Shane when it was assumed Rick was dead, as soon as her husband came back from the dead she stayed loyal and told Shane in no uncertain terms their affair was a mistake and it will not continue.

This meant that when her death came it left readers despondent, no less because not just Lori died, but the newly born Judith died with her. Kirkman’s choice of death for a new born and her mother? Shotgun, of course.

While escaping from the prison Lori, clutching baby Judith, was shot through the guts from behind with a shotgun, obliterating baby Judith in the process. It was a shockingly visceral death, and the fact Judith died too felt particularly cruel.

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Comic Michonne had somewhat different priorities compared to TV Michonne, namely her voracious appetite for men in the apocalypse. Throughout the volumes she works her way through: Morgan, Heath, Ezekiel, and Tyreese. None of her relationships end well.

Shortly after arriving at the prison, Michonne stakes claim to Tyreese, despite Tyreese already being in a relationship with Carol, and promptly seduces him. She does this by… well it seems to be less than voluntary oral sex on the part of Tyreese.

The panels Kirkman uses to convey this are evocative, as the head of Michonne slowly disappears while Tyreese weakly pleads with her not to. All this happens while Carol, unbeknownst to Tyreese and Michonne, is watching from the shadows. This act of betrayal drives the already unstable Carol over the edge and she tries to commit suicide.

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TV fans will remember the gut-wrenching moment we watched baby faced Carl put a bullet in his surrogate father’s zombified head to protect his real father. That was one of those moments where fans knew The Walking Dead wouldn’t be pulling any punches. If only they read the comics.

Comic Carl also kills Shane, but with the major difference that Shane was still alive and very human. Comic Shane had snapped and planned to take Rick out to the woods and kill him so he can be with Lori and Carl. Carl follows them and when Shane tries to kill Rick, Carl shoots him in the neck screaming at him not to hurt his daddy again. It’s a slow, agonising death as Shane was shot in the neck and slowly drowns in his own blood out in the dark woods.

The decision to have Carl kill human Shane is massive. Killing a walker Shane is traumatic no doubt, but there's a distinction to be made between the living dead and just the living Committing murder, of someone he was so close to - and at such a young age, no less - really conveyed to the reader just how harrowing growing up in this new world could be.