Torso

TORSO is the final book in my queue on the Mad Butcher of Kingsbury Run. This one is a graphic novel by Brian Michael Bendis and Marc Andreyko. Done in black and white with photo effects, this book is the weakest of the three. Some of this can be attributed to the art which goes for a very avant garde approach and some to the storytelling.

The art is in the style Bendis used in his days at Caliber – stark black and white using photorealistic depictions to the point that they look almost like photostats. It’s almost a comic book version of rotoscope animation. Bendis uses all of his tricks – double page layouts (where the reader reads across two pages rather than one), twisting layouts (where the panels radically depart from the standard grid layout), and the cop canvas (where multiple headshots tell the police what they know or where to go). None of these are a particular problem, but together they are just annoying – especially the twisting pages. I know he wants to give a sense of chaos or insanity, but it just irks.

Storywise, Bendis and Andreyko make the most of it, but still come up short. There is the typical light fictionalization, which does not affect anything. What doesn’t work are the addition of one detective’s personal narrative and the killer. They want to portray him as a total cipher and thus offer no explanations or resolutions to what he did. In the end, the killer murders a police officer and is allowed to get away with it. I have trouble believing this no matter how politically connected the killer was. All in all, the story feels shallow and incomplete.

To add insult to injury, the writers give little to no credit to the research for the story. Bendis is probably the most prolific comics writer today, but his style for the most part seems off-putting. As a comic reader, I will still encounter his work, but I do not go searching for it.

On a final note, the television show CRIMINAL MINDS depicted a killer who imitates the Mad Butcher for one of his murders. The team describes his motive as picking up gay men in a bar and shooting them in Kingsbury Run. A later discussion mentions that the modern killer failed to dismember the corpse. Outside of Kingsbury Run and dismembered corpses, almost all of the other details are wrong. I like the show, but laugh at the inaccuracies I can spot.

Good People

I really want to like Marcus Sakey novels, but I just cannot. The premise is sound and the writing is fine, but I just cannot sympathize with his characters or their situations. He reminds me very much of George Pellecanos and I do not like his books either. Everyone and everything is unpleasant and I just can't get into that vibe. I listened to this book in audio and the production was fine. It was natrrated by two people as the viewpoints shifted between the husband (or other male characters) and wife. This wasn't quite as jarring as DUNE's shift from cast to narrator, but it takes some getting used to.

I know there is an audience out there for this style of book, but it obviously isn't me.