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My Review of The Lindbergh Child by Rick Geary

The first time I opened The Lindbergh Child, it was hard not to be impressed by the artwork. The meticulous hatching, the double bordered panel outlines, the perfectly laid out text always running parallel to the panel borders – there’s a lot to admire. But unlike Laika, once I got a few pages in, I found the art to actually be a barrier to my immersion in the narrative. Each page seemed so crafted, so planned out (no mean feat next to Abadzis’s 8 drafts of every page) that it stifled the flow, and reminded me at several different points that I was reading a very well-researched graphic documentary of an event, as opposed to reliving it in the way I did Laika.

Going back to the artwork briefly, the key to leading a reader’s eye across a page of comics lies in “spotting” the blacks – that is, positioning large masses of black around the page to highlight specific parts. For example, the back of Violet Sharpe’s head on the second page of Part Four (ah the joys of no page numbers). Geary’s decision to reflect the character of the time – a society that stressed formality and rigidity to certain norms – in his heavy black panel borders undoubtedly lends an extra dimension to our understanding of the time the novel was set in. However, it does this at the expense of our ability to read each page easily – very quickly I found that against such a heavy black background, the detail of the panels with all their hatching soon greyed out and flattened the images within them. Take the first page of Part Seven, when we see Hauptmann behind bars – compare the top half of the page with the bottom and see how his lower body blends against the unnecessary detail behind him in the cell.

The next most significant factor in jarring me out of the narrative was the running commentary given to us in the form of captions, which at times lapsed into plain and simple illustration of what was drawn in the panel below. Condon’s rendez-vous in the St. Raymond’s cemetery breaks one of the cardinal rules in comics of ‘show, don’t tell’ – we see Condon in the middle of the panel, a car behind him and the gate of the cemetery to his right. The caption reads: “They stop at the Cemetery’s entrance, Condon gets out, leaving Lindbergh in the car. But he hesitates to enter the dark and threatening interior”.

The opportunity to highlight his internal monologue and introduce a more subjective POV is refuted by the dry, objective third person narrator. A sign for the cemetery and a close up on Condon’s hesitant, apprehensive face with Lindbergh telling him he’s wait in the car would have conveyed the same information with a much better sense of mood and atmosphere.

It’s not all bad, though! The sheer amount of detail and information Geary fits in clearly meant he had to choose between characterization or documentation and he chose the latter, leaving it to read like more of a court document than a dramatization. But in certain instances when the evidence comes to the fore, this approach works perfectly: the two pages describing poor Arthur Koehler’s journey around the country on the trail of wood with the same seam is a testament to both his and Geary’s borderline obsession with uncovering every last shred of evidence in the case.

I certainly learned a lot from this book about the case, but it definitely didn’t have anywhere near the same emotional punch as Laika did. In fact, I was more exasperated by the futility of the ending than I was actually sympathetic. But as an artist who sometimes falls into the same trap of using characters purely as vehicles to advance the plot of a comic, I identified with many of Geary’s decisions and will take away several lessons in how to improve my own work.