Did You Hear What Eddie Gein Done?

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We describe the isolated farmhouse in the book as an incubator for madness, and I think that’s a pretty accurate description for the abusive cycle this family put themselves through. it’s easy to have this kind of thought: What is there left to say about someone whose status as a horror from the heartland has been so thoroughly hashed over that it seems like there can’t be anything new to say about it?

Did You Hear What Eddie Gein Done? - Penguin Random House

This book takes Gein’s gruesome crimes out of the realms of exploitation and delivers a powerful, fact-based dramatization of the tragic, psychotic, and heartbreaking events,” said Powell. Maybe that’s what Alfred Hitchock was referring to when he said to fellow director François Truffaut that making Psycho took a “sense of humor;” That films like it couldn’t be made “without your tongue in your cheek. The father dies in 1940 and a few years later Henry (perhaps killed by his brother), leaving Eddie happily alone with his mother. Devoid of the inhibitions and moral conscience that keep the rest of us on the straight and narrow, they act out the savagery we have inherited from our primate ancestors. If you look at photographs of the newsstands in 1940s New York City, for example, you see an astonishing number of pulp true crime magazines.Then suddenly the narrative shifts to the day of his arrest and mostly becomes a sea of captions with a few flashbacks to his crimes tucked in between the endless talking heads of neighbors, authorities, and doctors. I trust as a society, we’re doing a better job of identifying at risk people and giving them the help they need as a child. For the benefit of those comics readers and Eric Powell fans who’ve never heard of Harold Schechter, rest assured that this is the ultimate possible creative true-crime collaboration. My own sense is that the enormous popularity of the podcast “Serial” and the HBO documentary “The Jinx” gave the genre a new cachet. Schechter and Powell are at the peak of their powers, and their collaboration on a graphic novel case history of the notorious Wisconsin necrophile/cannibal Ed Gein has borne a brilliant, insidious, terrible fruit.

Did You Hear What Eddie Gein Done? GRAPHIC NOVEL REVIEW: Did You Hear What Eddie Gein Done?

Whatever Gein was is not something that can be deduced from these pages, and this is not because there is something missing, rather because the man himself was impossible to decipher. The artist is collaborating on the 200-page true crime story with author Harold Schechter, considered an expert in the field of serial killers. I should add that ever since Art Spiegelman demonstrated the artistic potential of graphic novels in Maus, I’ve had a high regard for the genre.an all new, 200-page, original graphic novel illustrated by Powell that delves into the twisted history of the Gein family and the notorious violence that inspired Psycho, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and The Silence of the Lambs.