[In the following review, Russell lauds Brian Michael Bendis's Torso: A True Crime Graphic Novel as “a tour de force of graphic storytelling,” complimenting Bendis's use of photographs, collage, and realistic art.]

“Find the heads.”

It seems at first a simple investigation. If the two Cleveland homicide detectives who form the backbone to Torso's morbid tale can find the heads to two dismembered bodies, they figure that will give them enough clues to at least discover the identities of the victims if not the motive for the crimes. Unfortunately, from the moment that Eliot Ness is brought to town to root out corruption as Cleveland's new Safety Commissioner, nothing will go according to routine. Part by part, corpses will make continuous appearances, one with a direct challenge to Ness carved in its skin. Soon it begins to look as if one of the city's elite citizens has been performing medical experiments on poor vagrants, prostitutes, and homosexual night owls. Most of a body even surfaces at the Republican convention.

This isn't just some unsubtle allegory about the class struggle, but a true crime graphic novel built artistically from historical crime scene photographs. The crimes it relates took place in the late 30s and involved the first identified serial killer in the United States, a killer who was never captured. And Eliot Ness, coming almost directly from the success of his Untouchables campaign against Al Capone, really did get involved in this quagmire. He sank in so deep, it ended his marriage and his career.

Despite the enormous popularity, populous appeal, and veneer of social value of true crime stories, they do not often find their way into comic books—but not for a lack of reader interest. In comics' so-called Golden Era in the 30s and 40s, true crime was much in demand. Perhaps the most famous example is Lev Gleason Publications' monthly Crime Does Not Pay (1942), the creation of an early innovator named Charles Biro. It was both extremely violent and widely popular, boasting more than six million readers, but ultimately, like all its ilk, doomed by the Comics Code adopted in the 50s. Among other atrocities, the Comics Code, which all major comics publishers signed onto for more than 30 years, required that “scenes of excessive violence shall be prohibited. Scenes of brutal torture, excessive and unnecessary knife and gun play, physical agony, gory and gruesome crime shall be eliminated” (rule #7). Other rules banned strong language, marital discord, and the ridicule of law enforcement, all of which effectively ended the possibility not only of true crime, but of any comic with essentially adult content. Torso, originally published as a comic book miniseries, might well have been bowdlerized out of existence even only fifteen years ago.

Now collected into a graphic novel, Torso is a tour de force of graphic storytelling, and we're lucky to have it. But like anything truly innovative, it is not always easy to read. Although highly influenced by past conventions, it follows its own muse and is an extremely sophisticated comic that will require close attention from the uninitiated. Fortunately, movement between panels becomes, through consistency, easier to comprehend. A familiarity with film techniques also serves the reader well, as scenes fade in and out and graphical slow motion and montage sequences convey the narrative.

The main thing Torso does differently is the use of photographs. Very few comics have incorporated photographs in the past, almost none successfully, and I would argue that none have done so with the same panache as Torso. The photographs are used as backgrounds, set pieces, and settings; they reappear with different measures of focus; most importantly, they are always seamlessly incorporated, so much so that at times you cannot tell where the photograph ends and the drawing begins.

One of the best uses of a photograph in the book comes when Ness and his wife are leaving a gathering of Cleveland's rich and famous. When a card falls out of her jacket, which proves to be one of the killer's notorious postcards, Ness turns back to the party, of which we are shown a photograph. Now, perhaps this is not a photograph of the actual event, perhaps it is not even the real location, but the tables are set and the upper-crust crowd is clearly enjoying its meal. We immediately comprehend the impossibility of determining who, in the scene before us, has not only been butchering the poor but is sneaking notes to his nemesis like some kind of Dean Moriarty. Worse than a needle in a haystack, the photograph is irrefutable proof, a solid fact, that this is a homogenous, unadulterated haystack. The killer is hay in a haystack or just another needle in the pin cushion, if you will. No drawing could have driven this home with the same impact.

Normally, photographs do not work in comic art because they stand out, but nothing could stand out in the graphic texture of Torso. In other words, the photos remain as clunky as earlier attempts—there is simply no smooth way to incorporate them—but Torso turns this natural roughness into an asset. So many of the photographs are of clues and victims that it gives the book a quasi-documentary feel, and the repetition of images other than the photographs eliminates the possibility of discontinuity.

At first, such repetition is reminiscent of low-budget cartoons that set stock scenes to different dialogue, but artists Brian Bendis and Mark Andreyko have something different in mind. They exploit the eerie feeling that comes from the reappearance of the same image. For example, imagine a face with a look of horror in panel 1, then the same face in panel 2, then the same face in panel 3: dammit, what's he looking at that has him so worked up for so long? Or, my personal favorite: in panel 1 is a creepy old house, which we know to be the killer's lair, and in panel 2 you have the same picture of the creepy old house but with the word “CHOP” written over it in serial-killer font so you know it's a sound coming from the house, then in panel 3 you've got the same word over the same house three times. Taking tiny steps like this from moment to moment puts so much in the reader's imagination that it is actually a stronger way to convey the tension. Bendis and Andreyko know how to tweak the imagination, which is no doubt why Torso was nominated for both the International Horror Guild's Award for Best Graphic Story and the International Eagle Award for Best Black and White Comic, and why it won the comic industry's most coveted prize, the Eisner Award for Comic Book Excellence.

It's easy to see why Torso has garnered so much praise: it is simply the most uniquely rendered graphic novel since Spiegelman's Maus. However, Torso's technique is exactly the opposite. Where Maus rendered its story with animal faces and mock comic layouts to explore the humanity, Torso uses photographs, collage, and realistic art to distance the reader and dehumanize the setting.

Despite all of this, Torso is not perfect. Those portions of the story that are clearly inserted into the facts to distinguish the narrative from a simple recounting of the crime itself, although deftly done, stand out and at times ring false. One of the detectives, it is revealed, had supposedly kept secret the fact that he had known the victims all along. The killer himself, when he arrives, is in some ways a missed opportunity, which the authors choose to leave a mere cipher. But it seems unfair to ask more of a work that has accomplished so much.

Where Torso succeeds is in its synergy of effects—the rough art, the huge spaces of black, the twisting layouts, the collage work, the repeating images, and the dark, tragic story. It all comes together to create mood in a way no comic has before. And Torso is essentially a mood piece, spinning out its true crime tale more to create a feeling of helpless frustration, oppression, futility, failure, and of course fear as a backdrop against Eliot Ness's bigger-than-life bravado. Against such a backdrop, even Ness must fail. And nowhere is the comic more brilliant than when depicting the tragedy of Ness's heroism thwarted by the forces of corruption. He could beat Capone, but he didn't stand a chance against Cleveland.