Rick Geary is officially creeping me out.
Geary is the writer/artist who has been crafting charming graphic novellas about historical mayhem. He did nine books in his "Treasury of Victorian Murder" series of 19th-century crimes. Some murders were famous, some were not. Some were solved, some were not. In some of them, we saw really creepy people who were among the first known serial killers. In others, it was left to our imaginations.
Or, rather, to what historical record Geary could find. He excels at digging up information and, like a good journalist, presenting it to us without commentary, so we can make our own lurid guesses. His stories are illustrated in his attractive faux-woodcut style, which suggests a bygone time, with stiff people wearing rictus grins, standing with perfect posture in impeccable Victorian clothing, covered in blood.
It's great fun.
But lately, Geary has embarked on "A Treasury of 20th Century Murder," maybe having run out of cool 19th-century ones. The first two were about the Lindbergh baby and a murdered silent-film director. They were terrific, as all Geary's stuff is, and I read them voraciously and speculated on whodunit and ogled all the weird, spooky, old stuff.
Again, great fun.
Geary's latest edition is "The Axe-Man of New Orleans" (NBM, $16), about a serial killer who terrorized the Big Easy between the world wars. And authorities never caught him or figured out why the murders occurred, or anything. The police had no clue, which is unsettling.
But you know what's worse? That I never heard about it. Twelve middle-class people attacked in their beds in the middle of the night, with nothing stolen, by a guy who was trying to brain them in the head with an ax.
