“I can’t seem to face up to the facts; I’m tense and nervous and I can’t relax”
I love Eric Powell‘s art, but I usually don’t like his writing, so I’ve avoided his comics over the years because the art can’t quite save the writing (I know I say that art is more important than writing in comics, but it’s not the only thing). Whenever he draws something he doesn’t write or that he co-writes (like here), or if he’s doing something a bit out of his comfort zone (like here), I try to check it out. 
This book, co-written with true crime writer Harold Schechter, is about Ed Gein (I know, what gave it away?) and it’s published by Powell’s Albatross Funnybooks. I thought it would be neat to check out, because who doesn’t like a deep dive into the mind of a serial killer?
Everyone knows that Robert Bloch based Psycho on Gein, and then Hitchcock made his movie, and people got all mad at him because his movies were turning people into serial killers or something. Schechter and Powell begin the book with the movie and Hitchcock’s interview about how people should shut the hell up, and then they move to a brief moment when the police open a grave, not expecting to find that Gein had actually moved a body out of it. When they find that he had indeed done so, the writers jump back to his birth and show us how he became “Ed Gein.” The pre-arrest parts of the book, when not a lot of people knew who Gein was, are taken from Gein’s own confessions, so we do have to take them with a grain of salt. His mother, Augusta, is shown as an absolutely horrible woman, breaking her son down because she has had terrible experiences with men (Gein’s father, naturally, is a weakling, a coward, and a drunk) and coloring his view of the world and, especially, of sex. Even if Gein’s recollections aren’t quite what happened (memory is a tricky thing, after all), we know from other, more well documented serial killers that they’re made, not born, and it’s hard not to feel sympathy for Gein as his mother destroys him. 
Even if his memory isn’t 100% accurate, we can see that his brother could have had a better effect on him had he not died (or, perhaps, Gein murdered him, although the evidence is inconclusive) when Gein was 37. But even if the facts of his childhood aren’t completely accurate, Schechter and Powell do a good job showing how someone like Gein could come into being. The writers then skip straight to his arrest, after the police were questioning him about his final victim, not because he was a suspect, but because they knew he had seen her earlier in the day. When Gein started acting weird, they investigated his house and found a horror show. Then the writers delve into the years between Augusta Gein’s death in 1945 and his arrest in 1957, again using Gein’s own testimony. They do a good job with Gein himself – he’s clearly a monster, but he’s also very non-threatening, and it does seem as if he was only dangerous to elderly women who reminded him of his mother, as kids reported they hung out in Gein’s house with all the various human “trophies” in it and didn’t feel unsafe (although a few kids reported seeing the masks he made from skin, but they assumed they were rubber because why wouldn’t you?), so it’s not surprising that he could get away with this, even in a small community like Plainfield, Wisconsin. Schechter and Powell slowly unfurl the horrors of Gein’s crimes, so even though we know the broad outlines (if not the specifics, depending on how much you know about Gein), it’s still horrifying as we learn about him, because they do a good job making the people who discover these crimes react appropriately, and it draws us into their horror well. We’re a bit jaded these days, so it’s not easy to shock us, but the writers do a nice job revealing the extent of Gein’s depravity, so the creepiness of what he was doing builds well. 
And, of course, they also delve into what Gein thought, either through his own words or through people who studied him, and we come to a better understanding of Gein and his mind. It’s not enough to excuse his crimes, of course, but it does help because it’s clear that there were things going on in Gein’s brain that he couldn’t deal with. As we are parents of a brain-damaged kid, we’ve often heard over the years about how much we don’t know about the brain, and it’s clear that Gein’s brain was on a whole different wavelength than most of us.
Powell is such a good artist, as he uses those soft pencils and terrific shading to create a world that feels like the past, a bit idyllic, even as we know the horror is coming. He has a good ability to draw likenesses, so it looks like Gein, down to the droopy eye, and Powell makes him as unassuming as possible, except for a few rare moments when the monster comes out. When Gein is being interrogated, Powell uses the same image for him in a nine-panel grid, turning this into a bizarro Keith Giffen comic, and the repetition of the same image as Gein answers questions as blandly as possible has the desired effect to numb us to his crimes. Powell makes Augusta a forbidding, slab of a woman, and we can easily believe she dominates both her husband and her son, and he does a nice job showing Ed as completely deferential to her but still struggling with a hatred for her. He shows us Gein wearing the women’s skins very briefly, but his attention to detail makes it a terrifying few panels. The few times we see Ed’s fantasy world, Powell uses harder lines and not as much shading (plus there’s a fun homage in there that I saw and was glad it was deliberate), which makes it clear that the reality inside Gein’s head was the place he wanted to be. 
It’s a nice trick, and it adds a bit of insight into Gein’s character. Powell does such a good job making Plainfield just a dull little farming town in the middle of nowhere, and all the people seem nice (although we know that just because they’re “boring” doesn’t make them “nice”), so Gein’s crimes have a huge impact on them, and Powell shows that well.
This is an unpleasant book, of course, because of the nature of Gein’s crimes. But Schechter and Powell don’t show everything, so our imagination takes over, which is never a bad thing, and we make it worse. It’s a good comic that gives us a deep look into what most likely happened to Ed Gein that made him a monster. There’s always a backstory, and even if it’s clear Gein deserved to be locked up, his crimes didn’t happen in a vacuum, and it’s always interesting to see what turned people like Gein into what he became. There is a lot of blame to go around, and Schechter and Powell do a good job with that story. It’s too bad people like this exist and circumstances in which they become killers exist, but it’s not a bad thing to try to understand them.
Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ½ ☆ ☆
