The Things They Got Away With

My first impression after reading a couple of these stories is the dramatic shift and effect the art has on the style. Hyper realism, hyper dramatized lines portray the more ‘seedy’ lifestyles and the ‘darkness’ in people’s hearts. I really appreciate the renderings of each character. They all seem to live in a very dark, pessimistic world full of crime, murder, revenge and some sci-fi themes. Each story seems to have some twist in the end, either to teach a lesson or show an intense irony. I, being a huge fan of the Twilight Zone and scary stories, really enjoyed this new ‘type’ of comic book.

With my comparative paper still in mind, I couldn’t help consider the paneling, the use of light and dark in some splash pages and the intense type of action to action closure they use that jumps big stretches of time. The vivid narration allows the readers to imagine across huge amounts of closure or time. Explicit scenes are masterfully cut out and death is only shown partially. The mutilation of a dead dog and cat are coincidentally covered from the reader’s eye by the figure of their murderer.

Each short story reads exactly like that. A short story. The captions narrate nearly everything that happens but the comics compensate by providing dramatic closures and extreme changes in perspective that intensify the experience. The closure between panels expressed way more time passing between actions compared to The Mysterious Underground. Violence is insidious and hidden whereas the patriotic fighting for justice in Superman had full drawings of Superman beating the bejesus out of someone. Instead, the point of view in the panels are very realistic, very much in the eye of the victim, intense close-ups on face in pain or anguish. The whole experience is very graphic and as if you are in the room as the story. Some point of views that were especially jarring are page 41, first tier third panel.

I’ve also noticed that some panels are used to convey internal dialogues, feelings or emotions. Page 64 third row first panel is very unique-it only portrays the object, surrounded by words out of speech bubbles. They seem to be her internal emotions. However, these panels are important as

Without being intensely gory, the stories still seem to produce the same gut-twisting result. When considering the censorship of comic books that was occurring at the time, it’s amazing what the authors were able to get away with without being explicit. One story, “Blood Red Wine” literally douses the panels with wine that represents the blood spilled. Although readers know it’s wine that spills from the barrels, it spatters the page as realistically as blood would.

My only critique of these stories authenticity of these stories and its potential to be real seems a bit stretched when trying to deal with concepts of madness. Characters kill the wrong people way too many times, people’s plans always seem to fall through and bouts of madness have very little explanation.