A decade or so ago, bestselling American journalist David Grann published a collection titled The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession. It brought to light several unusual and compelling characters as well as stories, proving once again that fact was stranger than fiction. Once assumes Rick Geary would agree with that premise, given how a lot of his work prompts one to arrive at a similar conclusion.
Now 78 years old, the cartoonist and illustrator has often focused not just on interesting lives, but gory deaths. His first compilation, A Treasury of Victorian Murder (also NBM), looked at infamous names like Lizzie Borden and Jack the Ripper. This time, in A Treasury of XXth Century Murder Compendium II, he turns to dark things a little closer to our time, such as the Italian anarchists Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti who were convicted of murder in 1920s America; the Hall–Mills murder case from that same decade involving priest Edward Wheeler Hall and member of his choir Eleanor Mills, with whom he was having an affair; the much-publicized unsolved murder of Elizabeth Short (known as the Black Dahlia) in 1947, and a whole lot more. (You can read the BF review of Compendium I here.)
A year or so ago, experts in law and journalism at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill published a paper examining why so many of us are fascinated by true crime. They claimed that people were drawn to these sensational stories by multiple things, from curiosity about what motivated the criminals, to concerns about justice and the legal system, coupled with the age-old thrill of solving a real-life whodunnit. It helps makes sense of why so much in popular culture—from trade paperbacks to YouTube channels and seemingly endless shows commissioned by streaming services—continue to obsess over every little detail surrounding an unnatural death.
Geary certainly has an interesting approach to scratching this universal itch. He has a characteristic style that pays homage to artists like Edward Gorey, with a straightforward hatching technique that leaves little room for nuance. This forces his characters to drive much of the action, with faces and dialogue doing all the heavy lifting to create atmosphere or setting. His comforting style is also at odds with the material, making it seem as if one is settling in with an old-fashioned comic book that just happens to be about human depravity. It certainly works and helps explain why the series has been so popular.
There is also a lot of work that goes into recreating these stories, despite how deceptively simple the illustrations may sometimes appear. Geary puts together a lot of background information in a succinct manner, offers helpful bibliographies wherever possible, sticks to straightforward depictions of events, and adds extended coverage of court proceedings. What one gets, in the bargain, is a great mystery examined via multiple perspectives.
All said and done, collections like A Treasury of XXth Century Murder Compendium II offer almost everything one could want in a comic book. Geary has a winning formula and sees no reason to mess with it. He’s right about that.
Rick Geary (W/A) • NBM Publishing, $24.99
Buy A Treasury of XXth Century Murder Compendium II here
Review by Lindsay Pereira
