The Walking Dead: How Carl Grimes Loses His Eye

Judging by the standard set by many other characters from "The Walking Dead," Carl Grimes (Chandler Riggs) gets to live a relatively long life. Sure, he loses his eye as a teenager and spends most of his time just trying to survive, but in a zombie apocalypse, that ain't half bad. 

In both "The Walking Dead" comics and TV series, Carl gets his eye shot out by another person living in the enclave of Alexandria, but the circumstances in each version of the story are wildly different. In the comics, Carl is accidentally shot by Alexandria's leader, and the accident changes the course of his life and character arc forever. Comic book characters tend to have a signature appearance, and Carl grows into his cowboy hat and missing eye look as he becomes a larger part of the story of "The Walking Dead." 

In the TV show, there's a bit more drama building up to the gunshot that costs Carl his eye. A fellow survivor in Alexandria is actually trying to murder Carl's father Rick (Andrew Lincoln), but he misses. There's significantly less time for recovery afterward. Carl loses the eye in Season 6 and is killed off in Season 8, which is just a few months at most in the timeline of "The Walking Dead." As a result, the two versions of the story play out with slightly different details and vastly different implications. 

In "The Walking Dead" TV series, Carl loses his eye during the events of "No Way Out," the mid-season premiere of Season 6. The earlier half of the season followed Rick and the rest of the survivors in Alexandria trying to deal with a herd of walkers before it swarms the town. Needless to say, everything goes wrong, and "No Way Out" picks up with the walkers inside the walls of Alexandria.

A group of survivors including Rick, Carl, and the Anderson family are running through the streets trying to escape to safety when a walker attacks young Sam Anderson (Major Dodson). His mother Jessie (Alexandra Breckenridge) refuses to let her son go and gets swept into the fray. Jessie unfortunately has a tight grip on Carl's hand when the walkers pull her down, and Rick has to chop her arm off with an axe to save his son. Jessie's other son, Ron (Austin Abrams), sees everything that happens and pulls a gun on Rick. Just as Ron fires, Michonne (Danai Gurira) stabs him with a katana, and the bullet goes wide, hitting Carl in the eye instead of Rick.

In "The Walking Dead" comics, Carl loses his eye during the event of issue #83. As in the show, walkers have swarmed into Alexandria, and the survivors are desperately trying to escape. Rick, Carl, and Michonne are traveling alongside Alexandria leader Douglas, a woman named Jessie, and her son Ron. As they head out into the streets, Ron panics, causing Jessie and him to get swarmed, and just like in the show, Rick has to chop off Jessie's arm to save Carl.

What happens next is very different. Douglas is in a total panic as the walkers are moving toward the group, and he instinctively tries to save Rick and Carl — albeit not in a very helpful way. He starts firing his gun randomly while telling Rick and Carl to get to safety. Rick grabs his son and runs while trying to yell back to Douglas to get him to calm down. Douglas finally stops when a walker bites him, but by that point, he's already accidentally shot Carl in the eye.

Carl losing his eye is a dramatic event in both versions of the story, but one thing only comic book fans know about "The Walking Dead" is that the loss wasn't completely unprecedented. In the comics, Carl is actually the second Grimes family member to lose a body part. Early in the series, Rick loses his right hand, which writer Robert Kirkman has said put him in some narrative binds he regretted later.

Maybe that's part of why Kirkman decided to go a different direction when it was time for Carl to have his character-defining accident. Kirkman also had another source of inspiration. In the endnotes for "The Walking Dead Deluxe" issue #83, Kirkman said that he wanted Carl's accident to visually echo an image from a 1990 Todd McFarlane "Spider-Man" comic story called "Torment." 

In the story, Spidey sees a ghostly vision of Kraven the Hunter missing an eye and a sizable chunk of his face. Kirkman asked "The Walking Dead" artist Charlie Adlard to mimic McFarlane's panel for the moment Carl loses his eye, and the result became one of the most iconic images from "The Walking Dead" comics.

The two stories of how Carl lost his eye in "The Walking Dead" might seem like they only have superficial differences, but the changes that the TV show made actually have big implications for the character. In the comics, Carl's eye gets shot out by a good man trying to do the right thing in a bad situation. Carl's missing eye serves as a constant reminder of how dangerous the world can be, but also of how people still try to take care of each other. As Carl grows up, has his own children, and teaches them to have hope for a better future, his missing eye becomes more of a positive symbol than a stark reminder of a grim reality.

In the TV show, it's almost impossible to see Carl's lost eye as a sign of anything other than a cruel world. Ron doesn't mean to shoot Carl, but is trying to murder Rick when the accident happens. The accident compounds the horror of what happens to the Andersons, and in this version of the story, there's no sliver of light cutting through the clouds. As if that wasn't dark enough, the show made the divisive decision to kill Carl off just two seasons later, a controversial death that creator Robert Kirkman defended. The TV version of Carl doesn't live to see a brighter future, and that makes what happens to him even darker and more depressing than it already is.