At first glance, it’s easy to dismiss Emi Gennis’ graphic adaptation of Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood because of its short length. Objectively, the comic only covers the discovery of the Clutters’ bodies, the murders themselves, and the beginnings of the police investigation. Clocking in at seventeen pages, Gennis’ comic is miniscule in comparison to Capote’s colossal work of literary journalism. However, much like poetry, the comic medium not only thrives off of what it projects, but also what it excludes. Hillary Chute describes how “comics calls attention to its own additive nature…and also to what it subtracts, or refuses to measure and materialize,” (36). Scott McCloud reinforces this notion in his discussion of cartooning in his book, Understanding Comics, when he states that “by stripping down an image [though cartooning] …an artist can amplify [its] meaning in a way that realistic art can’t,” (30). With these theories in mind, Gennis’ brief adaptation can be read as a cartooning, both graphically and thematically, of Capote’s text. She takes full advantage of the comic medium’s reductive nature to concentrate the social fears that arose from the Clutters’ murders into a tiny, seventeen-page spread.
One of the main differences that arises in the adaptation is the shift in perspective. Capote’s novel focuses on the retelling through Dick and Perry, and the readers begin following their story from very early on in the novel. Because of this centralization of the criminals as the main characters, Capote falls slightly short in being able to express the communal fear that came as a result of the crime. He writes, “Another reason, the simplest, the ugliest, was that this hitherto peaceful congregation of neighbors and old friends had suddenly to endure the unique experience of distrusting each other…they believed that the murderer was among themselves…” (Capote 84). In Cold Blood’s concentration on Dick and Perry, while it does humanize them, works against the argument of their universality. Especially with passages that highlight Perry’s legs as “chunky and dwarfish” (Capote 30) and Dick’s face as one “which seemed composed of mismatching parts. It was as though his head had been halved like an apple…” (29) Capote’s emphasizing of their physical scars and deformities separates them from the general populace and makes it easier to see them as the “other”.
Meanwhile, Gennis’ comic does the exact opposite. One of the most obvious, but also most purposeful, graphical decisions she makes in her comic is her simple drawing style. With the omission of blurred shading and the abundance of thick, heavy lines, Gennis’ adaptation does not even attempt to portray itself as realistic; it fully accepts and projects its cartoon qualities, as shown with her depictions of Dick and Perry.
In the center of the top panel and again on the middle-right panel, both of the men are not only drawn sans excessive detail, but are dressed in standard, common clothing. Coupled with the general lack of color, Dick and Perry are shown to have very few distinctions from each other.
The ability of cartoons to focus our attention on an idea is, I think, an important part of their special power…the universality of cartoon imagery. The more cartoony a face is, for instance, the more people it could be said to describe…(McCloud 31)
Despite their simplicity, Gennis, through the strategy of graphic cartooning, is able to emphasize the terrifyingly ubiquitous qualities of the Clutters’ murderers. Unlike Capote, Gennis makes the criminal’s injuries invisible to the viewer, not just in these panels, but throughout the entire adaptation. With the lack of physical deformity, the normal button-up clothing, and the mirroring of Dick and Perry, Gennis perpetuates the feeling that these murderers could be anyone, including the readers themselves. One of McCloud’s arguments about cartooning is that there is a “degree to which the audience identifies with a story’s characters…most characters were designed simply, to assist in reader-identification,” (43–44). If Gennis were to draw Dick and Perry with more physical detail, their realism would “objectify them, emphasizing their ‘otherness’ from the reader,” (McCloud 44). By cartooning the criminals, Gennis turns them into a terrifying embodiment of everyman, forcing the audience to feel some of the “experience of distrusting” (Capote 84) that penetrated the previously peaceful atmosphere of Holcomb.
On the topic of Holcomb, Gennis doesn’t just cartoon the characters, but the setting as well.
By de-emphasizing the appearance of the physical world in favor of the idea of form, the cartoon places itself in the world of concepts…when cartoons are used throughout a story, the world of that story may seem to pulse with life. Inanimate objects may seem to possess separate identities…(McCloud 41)
The most prominent example of this cartooning of setting in Gennis’ comic is in her depiction of the Clutters’ house.
As evident from figure two, when Nancy Ewalt and Susan Kidwell make their way to the house, it has only the simplest of details and is mostly consisted of blank, white walls. If this scene is read through the lens of McCloud’s cartooning theory and the house is thought of as an additional character, the contrast between the pure white front and the pitch black windows acts as a visual foreshadowing of the terrible events that have transpired the night before, as if the house itself were showing signs of the violence. In Capote’s novel, Susan expresses this sentiment when she says “I was frightened, and I don’t know why…the sun was so bright, everything looked too bright and quiet,” (Capote 57). With the comic’s absence of dialogue in this scene and the stark juxtaposition of the white house and dark windows (and the car which looks almost hearse-like), Gennis visualizes Susan’s fear onto the page such that the readers are able to experience it themselves. Then, after the reader is witness to the happenings of the previous night, the comic ends with another shot of Susan and Nancy arriving to the Clutters’ home.
What is immediately obvious about this scene is the color change of the house from white to black. Hillary Chute argues that “comics materialize the physically absent. It inscribes and concretizes, through the embodied labor of drawing,” (27). The twinning of the beginning and the end of the comic not only implies the perpetuity of violence, but turns the house into a medium for viewer-identification. McCloud uses the example of a car and how vehicles can become “an extension of our body. It absorbs our sense of identity…if one car hits another, the driver…is much more likely to say: Hey! He hit me!!” (38). In Gennis’ comic, the darkening of the house over the course of the comic physicalizes the demoralizing effect of violence on both the reader and Holcomb. Because of the cartooning of the house, Gennis is able to use a simple transition of colors to depict the irreversible loss of innocence that occurs in the house, the reader, and the town as a result of the Clutters’ murders.
Another important change that Gennis makes in her comic is the removal of most of the dialogue. In Capote’s novel, when Perry recounts Nancy begging for her life, he describes her as yelling “Oh, no! Oh, please. No! No! No! No! Don’t! Oh, please don’t! Please!” (Capote 238). Because of the traditional syntax of a novel, the placement of all the words side by side with its heavy repetition persuades the audience to read these lines as extremely panicked. Compare this frantic pleading with Gennis’ adaptation of the same scene.
One of the key facets of the comic medium is how it relinquishes the control of time within the work to the reader. This is done through the gutter, a space “where, in a sense, the reader makes the passage of time in comics happen,” (Chute 35). When thinking about the gutter of a comic, most people think of the space between panels, but discount the space between word bubbles. Yet, in this scene of Gennis’ comic, the dark void between Nancy’s two utterances of “please” sets the tone for the entire scene. Chute states that “it is crucial, especially in texts that devolve upon violence and trauma, that comics leaves the question of pace open…A reader can make his or her experience…more relentless in that way,” (37–38). It is up to the reader to decide how long the pause is between the two word bubbles, and also how long after the second “please” does the gunshot happen. These moments of silence, mixed with the omission of Capote’s exclamation marks and panicked tone, allow the reader to simultaneously amplify and empathize with the horrifying hopelessness of Nancy’s situation.
When most people think of cartooning in comics, they imagine simple drawings that are made to appeal to children. The term “cartooning” in itself is wrongly associated with a loss of complexity and the inability to properly portray elaborate arguments. However, as McCloud states, “Cartooning isn’t just a way of drawing, it’s a way of seeing!” (31). Emi Gennis, through her use of cartooning, is able to perpetuate the fears and social effects that resulted from the Clutters’ murders in a short, seventeen-page comic. With her decisions of what to include in terms of dialogue, color, and drawing style, Gennis’ work exemplifies how what isn’t seen in a comic is just as important as what is. Comics are “a form about presence, [but] it is also stippled with erasure…it provokes the participation of readers in those interpretive spaces that are paradoxically full and empty,” (Chute 17). A comic’s lifeblood is made up of negative space and subtraction, and to treat a work as insignificant due to its length or simple art style is akin to ignoring a Frost poem because it didn’t seem long enough.
Bibliography
Capote, Truman. In Cold Blood. Penguin Classics, 1966.
Chute, Hillary L. Disaster Drawn. Visual Witness, Comics, and Documentary Form. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2016.
Gennis, Emi. “In Cold Blood.” The Graphic Canon of Crime and Mystery, Vol. 1, edited by Russ Kick, Seven Stories Press, 2017, http://www.emigennis.com/in-cold-blood/.
McCloud, Scott. Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art. HarperCollins, 1994.
