Torso

Marc Andreyko

Sometimes it seems like every city wants to claim a serial killer. Look at the number of municipalities who seem almost proud that Jeffrey Dahmer spent a portion of his upbringing in them; Akron, Ohio, just down the road from me, is one of them. A little closer to home and a little farther away in time, though, Cleveland was the home (and may still be…) of one of the most notorious serial killers active in the first half of the twentieth century: the Torso killer.

Bendis and Andreyko brought the Torso Killer, and Elliott Ness' hunt for him, to stark, ugly life in the series of comic books that has since been collected in this graphic novel. All those faults I found in Doran's A Distant Soil are absent here; Bendis and Andreyko know exactly what they're doing with keeping the reader up to speed with what's going on with each character, know exactly how much they can fit into any given page without overwhelming the reader's sensibilities, and did meticulous research on the case (living in Cleveland, it's kind of hard to get away from the details; the Torso Killer is one of our local public television station's favorite subjects). Only a piece of the ending has been shifted from the way the actual case went, presumably for dramatic effect.

But the book does not just stop at the Torso Killer, delving into the private lives of some of the folks who worked on the case, as well. The result is a cast of well-drawn characters, a good (and faithful, for the most part, to the truth) story, intriguing artwork, a fine script, and a bang-up mystery. How can you possibly go wrong?