The Governor (comic series)

""Kill Them All""

- The Governor's most famous quote in the comic series

""Only a matter of time now!""

- The Governor's catchphrase

The Governor is a fictional character and one of the main antagonists of The Walking Dead franchise.

The Walking Dead: Rise of The Governor
Brian Blake, also known as The Governor, is one of the primary protagonists in the novel The Walking Dead: Rise of The Governor, alongside his brother, Phillip. He is described as being a skinny man and is intelligent and good-natured, but meek, insecure, and prone to shying away from danger or seeking protection from Philip (despite being the elder brother). Before the apocalypse he was briefly married to a "crazy" Jamaican woman named Jocelyn, who left him, and set up several music shop businesses with money borrowed from his parents - all of which failed. When the apocalypse started, he was living with his parents (it is unknown what happened to them, but they may have been killed at the start of the outbreak). He joined Phillip, his daughter Penny and Philip's two friends Nick and Bobby in order to survive. After Bobby dies from blood loss after being bit by a zombie, Brian, Phillip, Penny and Nick take their weapons and supplies and head off to find a home.

While traveling through Atlanta, the group meets a family in an apartment, where they take up residence but are soon kicked out by the family. They then live in an abandoned house, where a drug-addled and heavily armed gang attempt to take the house and kill the group.

A gunfight ensues and then ends with most members of the gang being killed and Penny being shot and killed as well, despite Brian's attempts to protect her. In response, an enraged and grief-stricken Phillip beats Brian severely, blaming him for not keeping his daughter safe. Nick helps Brian recover and the two discover, to their horror, that Phillip is holding two of the gang members, a man and a woman, captive and has been horrifically torturing them (and raping the woman) for days in revenge for what happened to Penny. Nick shoots both of them to end their suffering. Brian and Nick argue about Phillip; Brian is horrified by what his brother has done but refuses to abandon him out of sibling loyalty and gratitude for keeping the group alive so far, whilst Nick argues that Phillip has lost it completely and thinks they should leave him. After that, Brian, Phillip and Nick discover Woodbury, a beat up old town with a fair amount of people living in it. They then take up residence in a apartment, where Phillip sneaks Penny, as a zombie, inside and feeds her appendages from bodies of people he claims he didn't kill.

One night, Nick saw Phillip dragging a girl against her will and he and Brian tried to stop him, which ended with Nick shooting and killing Phillip and also accidentally shooting the girl Phillip was dragging. Nick was then killed on the spot by Brian, who held Phillip while he died in his arms. The next day, Woodbury is being terrorized by National Guard soldiers. Brian, who always went to Phillip for protection during intense situations, wonders what his brother would do, undergoes an out of body experience that has him carrying out the vision of what Phillip would do and murders the soldiers' leader, Gene Gavin.

Brian then encouraged the residents of Woodbury to help him kill the remaining soldiers and became the leader of Woodbury. One of the residents, Martinez, asks Brian his name, to which Brian tells him that his name is Phillip Blake.

Comics
Brian Blake was a central antagonist of The Walking Dead comic book series; serving as the main antagonist from Volume 5: The Best Defense to Volume 8: Made To Suffer. Although other villains exist throughout the series, Brian has been a much larger threat than others, leaving him to be the main antagonist of the comic series, until the arrival of other equally large threats such as Negan and Alpha. Brian's atrocity and brutal terror towards Rick's group affected their mindset drastically to date, making the main survivors even more colder and hardened than they ever were.

As the Governor, he feeds outsiders to the zombies and runs fights between his people with the zombies surrounding them. He also keeps Penny as a zombie pet and keeps the heads of his decapitated victims in fish tanks.

When Rick Grimes, Michonne and Glenn Rhee arrive in town, the Governor appears friendly at first, until he reveals his true colors and demands to know the location of the prison. When they refuse to reply, the Governor cuts off Rick's hand, rapes Michonne repeatedly and mentally traumatizes Glenn. After Marinez helped the three escape, Michonne brutally dismembers and disfigures the Governor and leaves him to die, but the Governor is saved by his two top men - Bruce and Gabe - and survives with the help of Bob Stookey, the town drunk who was a former army medic. After that, the Governor receives Martinez's zombified head and uses it as propaganda to make it like he was murdered by Rick's group in cold blood. With that, he and his army attack the prison, but they are soon forced to retreat. When Michonne and Tyreese follow them in an attempt to kill the Governor, Tyreese is captured and Michonne's katana is taken. With Tyreese hostage, he demands Rick and his group to give up the prison or he will murder Tyreese. After Tyreese tells them not to let him in and so they do, the Governor decapitates him with Michonne's katana and kicks his body into the grass field. He then returns to his people saying that Rick's group murdered Tyreese. They then attack the prison a second time. When many of the Governor's men are killed, the Governor, in an act of desperation, rams his tank through the prison fences. This leads to members of Rick's group killed and allows the zombies to enter the prison.

In the ensuing gunfight, the Governor kills Alice and notices the Grimes family trying to escape - prompting him to order fellow Woodbury resident Lilly Caul to kill them; she manages to shoot Lori dead while Carl and Rick escape. The Governor is about to send his men to hunt down Rick and Carl when he notices Hershel sitting in despair nearby; his son Billy had been killed just moments ago. When Hershel begs to be killed, The Governor obliges and fatally shoots him in the head. Shortly afterwards, Lilly examines Lori's dead body and discovers Judith under her; Judith had been killed when Lilly shot Lori dead, an act which caused the mother to fall on top of her baby - unwittingly suffocating the infant to death. Horrified and enraged, Lilly angrily brands the Governor a monster when he confronts her about her attitude - hysterically berating him for making her kill a baby; she becomes furious enough to draw her gun at the Governor, but the distraction of oncoming zombies allows the Governor to fight back and punch her onto the ground. While fending off a horde of zombies, The Governor desperately tires to retain his control over his army by assuring them that - in spite of the escalating situation - they can still win the war. However, Lilly - finally realizing how evil the Governor truly is - openly pulls out her handgun and shoots him in the face. She then kicks his body into the hordes of the zombies, leaving the Governor to die as he gets eaten alive by the sheer number of zombies; Lilly and the remaining Woodbury soldiers use this opportunity to narrowly escape. With the Governor dead and his reign of terror finally brought to an end, the deaths of those that he himself had committed - including Tyreese, Axel, Patricia, Billy, Alice, Lori, Judith, and Hershel - have all been avenged.

Trivia
The Governor is one of the most evil villains in The Walking Dead media and one of the only few villains to be considered Pure Evil, alongside Thomas Richards, Simon, Joan, and William Carver.