Review - The Fatal Bullet by Rick Geary
May 16th, 2008 John Posted in Books, Comic Books, Reviews |
When it comes to the study of presidential assassinations, Kennedy and Lincoln tend to draw all the attention away from Garfield and McKinley, but Rick Geary is out to change a little of that with his graphic novel “The Fatal Bullet,” a tight non-fiction affair that not only recounts the assassination, but the circumstances that lead up to it. What Geary delivers is a captivating portrait of two men — Garfield and his assassin, Charles J. Guiteau — in a narrative framework of parallel paths, one all-American, one demented, and both crossing at several points.
Geary begins his book with a very funny cartoon depicting “The Two Roads,” which has Garfield beginning life in “a frontier boyhood of hard work and piety,” while pathetic Guiteau is doomed to “a childhood lost and love-less.” For Guiteau, it’s all down hill from there.
The guiding forces behind Guiteau’s trajectory are twin sicknesses — delusions of grandeur and a devotion to an unhinged religious cult. Guiteau was convinced he would be a man of greatness, even if reality conspired to prove otherwise, and the key ingredient separating one’s mind from reality was planted in him in 1861, in a religious community in Oneida, NY. This talent for self-derangement was called upon in a series of swindles that allowed Guiteau to masquerade as a legitimate man of importance, while stealing money from clients and remaining perpetually on the run.
Guiteau began to believe his own lies and, as a man who could not separate fantasy from reality, became convinced that he would gain a position through Garfield, an appointee for a political post abroad. Disappointment mixed with madness and a word from God himself signaled to Guiteau what he had to do to save the Republican Party and the nation — and he attached himself to his mad calling with a meticulous vigor, stalking the president until he could send him on what turned out to be a slow and painful descent into death.
In Geary’s hands, the story of how Guiteau ends up shooting President Garfield unfolds with a finger-wagging humor brought forth by an overwrought Victorian sneer that wraps itself around the facts of the tale. Not that this attitude takes away from the true story — in fact, it bolsters it, working well with Geary’s visuals to gives the tone of a report being given at the time this is all happening. Not content to stay at arm’s length from the proceedings, Geary’s meticulous recounting of events passes through private moments of both men, tracing the motivations, animosity and madness in a fluid and emotional way.
Along the way, Geary dispenses interesting facts and contexts that make the story — and the world in which it unfolds — even more real to the reader. In his work, published under the umbrella title “A Treasury of Victorian Murders,” Geary has done well to document the fact that psychotic madmen bent on carnage are nothing new to the landscape. The immediacy of our media — and the enormity of its scope — makes it seem as though things have gotten somehow worse in that area. But Guiteau is merely one point in a long line that passes through John Hinckley and Seung-Hui Cho and, sadly, onto an area beyond the latest incarnation.
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