The facts and stats behind The Walking Dead are what decide the cast’s deadliest character, and the numbers don’t lie: Andrea is the most proficient killer in Robert Kirkman’s iconic comic series. The Walking Dead has many prolific killers, and there are several contenders for those who might be the deadliest. Michonne may spring to mind first, or Negan, considering his bloody record-setting debut alone. However, Andrea outranks them all.

Believe it or not, The Walking Dead’s Andrea is officially the universe’s deadliest character. Some readers may doubt this assessment, but there are statistics to back this up.

Once readers analyze those statistics, as well as the average reader’s perception of Andrea’s character, it may be time to reevaluate Andrea’s place in the franchise. In the comics, she’s a 20-something law firm clerk who’s easy to underestimate due to her stature and inexperience, but as the series goes to prove, there’s more than meets the eye.

Andrea Killed More Human Characters Than Anyone Else In Robert Kirkman’s Original Walking Dead Comic Series

Total Body Count: 45

When readers go back and chronicle every single one of Andrea’s kills in the Walking Dead comics, they will count that Andrea sports an estimated 45 kills in total, more than any other character in the series. That actually far exceeds Negan’s total, 28, which is the second highest in the series. Following them, ranking third, is Michonne, at just 13 human kills. These numbers might surprise readers, but given Andrea’s status as the survivors’ resident sniper, it makes sense – and suggests her off-panel total is probably much larger.

She was not a killer in the same sense as the vicious Negan, or a sword-wielding warrior like Michonne; she didn’t have bloodlust, or an eagerness to fight, but Andrea was extremely efficient at what she did.

While Andrea entered the Walking Dead franchise with a timid personality, as someone out of her element, she slowly morphed into a tactical mastermind. She was not a killer in the same sense as the vicious Negan, or a sword-wielding warrior like Michonne; she didn’t have bloodlust, or an eagerness to fight, but Andrea was extremely efficient at what she did. Maybe it’s due largely to being driven by her romance with Rick Grimes and her undying love for Carl, but her motivation drove her to get better at her kill rate. She improved to protect her loved ones.

Andrea Might Not Have Been Walking Dead’s Most Hardcore Character, But She Was It’s Most Precise Killer

The Best At What She Did

Andrea’s status as the deadliest character in Walking Dead history should remind fans of the franchise that nothing was ever exactly as one would suspect from Robert Kirkman’s series, which continually subverted expectations, and hooked readers by developing characters in complex, multifaceted ways. No character was just a mindless killer – even the series’ most heinous, unrepentant villains – and in fact, the most prolific life-ending character turns out to have been a beloved member of the cast since the second issue of The Walking Dead.

In retrospect now, Andrea can be viewed as adapting better to the zombie apocalypse landscape than the rest of her peers in The Walking Dead. On paper, she is far ahead of the game than any other human killer in the comics, and by a wider margin than anyone would expect. Again, she’s not deadly in the sense of being, trigger-happy or eager to end someone’s life, but it became easier for her, as her killer instinct was sharpened over the course of the series. For that reason, that makes Andrea the deadliest character in The Walking Dead.