Besides the Walkers, the two big villains introduced in the published pages of Robert Kirkman and Charlie Adlard's "The Walking Dead" has been The Governor and now Negan. At the moment, if you ask fans of the comic book series who's their favorite villain, you'll probably get more votes for Negan than The Governor. With that popularity, Kirkman was asked if there's any desire to introduce the villain earlier than what would necessarily be the expected insertion point. Said Kirkman, "That's definitely a real temptation when you are adapting a show." He continued, "It's sometimes a struggle because I feel like there are very cool things that are waiting in the wings in the comics that we could do earlier in the show. But those things only work the way they work because of everything that came before them. We have to build up to them properly. Negan isn't going to be as cool if we don't set up this, this, this, and this. We do want to do Negan, and it seems likes everyone on the show does want to do Negan, but we are going to have to do all these other things first."*New showrunner Scott Gimple also commented on the introducing of Negan, stating, "Reading the book now and reading Negan as a character, I'm like, "Damn, there's so much to do before we get to him!" One of my favorite issues with him recently was the Carl/Negan issue. I think it'd be such an amazing episode of TV, but we have a lot to do before we get there."