Warning! Spoilers for The Walking Dead comic
Over the course of both The Walking Dead comic and television show, there have been tons of heartbreaking moments involving popular characters getting surprisingly killed in gruesome fashion. Few characters have made it from the start of the series to the final chapter of the popular comic. However, for co-creator Robert Kirkman, one moment stands above the rest: The death of Andrea.
In the comic book by Kirkman, Tony Moore, and Charlie Adlard, the version of Andrea compared to the television character have some notable differences. In the TV series, Andrea (played by Laurie Holden) is a core survivor. She later develops a relationship with the Governor and was eventually killed (following a zombie bite) after discovering his true, evil intentions. In the comics, Andrea is one of the original survivors in Rick’s group. Unlike the show, she develops a relationship with Rick and survives quite a bit longer in the overall arc. In the comic, Andrea is bitten on the neck by a walker, and Rick is forced to kill her (by stabbing her in the head) so she doesn’t reanimate as one of the undead. Her death in The Walking Dead #167 was Kirkman’s most heartbreaking moment.
During Robert Kirkman’s Comic-Con at Home live stream, he took questions about The Walking Dead, Invincible, and his latest Fire Power series. When asked what the hardest/most heartbreaking thing he had to write in the zombie series, Kirkman brought up killing off Andrea.
Easily, Andrea’s death. Definitely. There’s a lot of heartbreaking stuff that happened in The Walking Dead, but that’s the one that hit me the most, just because that’s a character that I lived with for a good long time. And, I was very upset and sad to see her go, even though I was hyper-aware at the time of the fact I was the one that was doing the thing that was causing me that pain. It was definitely a weird experience. Andrea’s death was pretty heartbreaking.
While death is a frequent occurrence (and often a major plot point) in The Walking Dead comics, that doesn’t mean it was easy for Kirkman to kill off characters. Clearly, Andrea meant a lot to him and the readers, so deciding to end her story had to be tough. Andrea’s evolution from one of the survivors into a key player in the series represented an incredible individual arc. She was a badass and gave Rick and Carl some hope after losing so much during the apocalypse. She might not have made it to the end of the series, but Andrea was a huge part of what made The Walking Dead great – Kirkman knew that which made ending her story that much harder, even if it made sense in the story.
