Graphic shockers

The Lindbergh Child and Inside Outside Overlap offer innocence, horror and delight

by JULIET WATERS

The numbness that blankets Rick Geary’s The Lindbergh Child feels eerily familiar, not just because winter is setting in. Geary’s brilliantly illustrated retelling of the first “crime of the century” is set during the Great Depression. This is a society where the shocks just keep coming, and nobody seems immune.

Charles and Anne Lindbergh were the original high flyers. As an aviator couple, they mapped air routes across the globe, set transcontinental speed records and unintentionally became publicity icons for an emerging transportation industry. They became one of the first couples to be oppressively stalked by paparazzi. The birth of their first son intensified the public’s thirst for knowledge. One night, a stranger who crawled in through the nursery window kidnapped the baby.

The world went wild, aided in no small part by an increasingly rabid media. The rural road leading to their secluded property was jammed with traffic. Tense weeks of failed negotiations with barely literate kidnappers, desperate for money, turned into months of despair. The case remained unsolved as con men set in to exploit and confuse the situation. Though the baby’s body was eventually found, and a suspect convicted and executed, unanswered questions have always haunted this story.

The Lindbergh Child doesn’t offer up any new theories. What it does is capture the strange mixture of innocence and horror in this story with a unique and contemplative sense of irony. Geary started his career at National Lampoon and Heavy Metal magazines, and is generally considered a master of high contrast paper and ink illustration. His Treasury of Victorian Murder books are considered some of the best graphic novels written. This is the first volume of a Treasury of XXth Century Murder.

Geary’s genius is condensing high contrast drama into miniaturist proportions. Every frame is obsessively crafted. No background is repeated. Each face in a cast of about 100 is unique. At the heart of this work is a contrast almost as important as black and white. It’s the contrast between the media’s intrusive interest in today’s tragedy, with an artist’s loving rendering of yesterday’s mystery.

Billy Mavreas has also built a pretty solid underground career as a master of high contrast. He once told me an anecdote about one of his greatest influences, his brother leaning over his shoulder and repeating the same advice again and again: “more black.” So his first graphic novel, Inside Outside Overlap, was a shock, to this reader at least. The wordless but evocative story of Boy Priest and his furry “cat” companion Life Form is told in such delicate shades of pencil drawing, I’m still afraid I’m going to smudge it.

Reckless thumbing does not seem to be as much of a worry for my eight-year-old son who I’m hoping has now moved on from his weird obsession with Garfield. The softness of the drawings will lull some Christmas shoppers into thinking this is a kid’s book, and discourage others from thinking it’s an adult book. It’s both, though some of the subject matter may be a little intense for the Runaway Bunny set.

Mavreas proves that shades of soft grey can still be pretty disturbing, as the shadowy souls of Mavreas’s iconic “overlords of glee” infest the night terrors of the boy in his otherwise comfy Zen universe. My son was fascinated, genuinely scared, but eager to read the next adventure. In the meantime, we’re both happily re-reading this one, as I give praise to our overlords for the invention of high-resolution scanners. It takes some pretty high-tech machines to make such low-tech magic available to the masses. Every time I read this, I find another layer of wordless smudged subtext.

In an afterword that will delight his fans as much as the story itself, Mavreas promises that the next comic he does will be all words. Yes, as I mentioned earlier, the shocks just keep coming. Fortunately, some are better than others

THE LINDBERGH CHILD BY RICK GEARY,
NBM/COMIC LIT, HC, 189 PP, $15.95.
INSIDE OUTSIDE OVERLAP BY BILLY
MAVREAS, TIMELESS BOOKS, PB,
86 PP, $14.95