In Van Jensen and Nate Powell’s Southern Gothic crime graphic novel “Two Dead,” Gideon Kemp, a new police officer and a World War II veteran getting bearings in 1946 Little Rock, meets another police officer. But this police officer is part of the segregated Black police force, “the other cops,” who look out for their “part of the city.” Kemp recognizes the Black officer’s decorated uniform and identifies him with respect as a soldier from the 92nd Infantry. With compliments, Kemp mentions being stationed alongside the 92nd.
“That so?” says the Black police officer, brushing his shoulders off from a dust-up with Kemp’s racist partner. “Well… this isn’t Europe.”
Written by Van Jensen and Illustrated by Nate PowellFrom the acclaimed DC Comics writer and the artist of the #1 New York Times bestselling and National Book Award–winning illustrated trilogy “March” comes a stunning crime noir graphic novel exploring the intertwining threads of crime, conspiracy, racism, and insanity in the post-World War II Deep South.
If the cover of “Two Dead” (Gallery 13) looks like it’s going to absorb you into a knotty, gut-punching thrill ride, it delivers. There’s crime, there’s noir, there’s racial conflict, there’s insanity, all as advertised. The book is a compelling read about a web of tough, vivid characters full of bite and fire.
But artist Nate Powell’s dedication of the book to his hometowns Little Rock and North Little Rock, Arkansas, offer a hint of how there’s something more here. Powell writes of Little Rock, “my comics will always be equal parts love letter, anchor, and reckoning with you.”
“Two Dead” opens with the character who takes us into the drama, the aforementioned Sergeant Kemp, as he’s in the snowy German forest where he serves as a principled and surviving soldier in the War. We witness Kemp and the Private with him as they encounter a potential enemy in the woods, and have to fire. Sadly, it turns out to be a case of friendly fire, and we are set up for Kemp’s arc as a good man with a tragic road.
Looking to do some good and returning to his birthplace Little Rock, Kemp joins the police force via the FBI Academy. Little Rock’s Mayor Spick likes his credentials and tasks him to a special role as his inside man to keep tabs on Chief of Detectives Abraham Bailey, a popular figure in Little Rock’s white community, positioned to take over as the next Police Chief, but corrupt and racist and apparently battling some mental demons. Bailey’s schizophrenia turns out to mix dangerously with his above-the-law attitude, and Kemp is assigned as his partner and soon mixed up in Bailey’s dealings with the city’s mobsters, its Black community, and a deepening noir whirlpool of trouble.
Meanwhile, we meet Jacob and Esau Davis, brothers on opposing sides of righteousness like their biblical namesakes. Jacob heads that ad hoc militia in the Black community, primarily veterans ensuring safety where the city cops won’t bother to go. Esau, on the other hand, is working his way up the illicit ranks of the junctures between Little Rock’s mob presence and the African American neighborhood. The two brothers angle for winning the other over to their side, but both sides are fraught with the specters of segregation, neglect, and exploitation
Other specters trail the other characters as well, from Bailey’s apparitions of his disconnection from reality to Kemp’s haunting trauma of war, along with how white supremacy degrades the humanity of the white folks in Little Rock too. These ghosts hang, weigh, lurk in darknesses, while the tale spins speedily forward.
This is what Nate Powell does with his alluring artistry. Readers who know Powell well from “March” will find in “Two Dead” something of the intrigue of Powell’s other work, which has dwelt on the South, the historical past, race relations, mental health, communities of close-knit (or cultish) allegiance and disruption, and the underbellies of human passions before in his other works. Powell’s art here exhibits why he seemed to me an odd fit at first for “March,” John Lewis’s civil rights era autobiography, until I could see how all those elements lent perfectly to the freedom rider/SNCC leader/congressman’s story.
Continued belowPowell’s swirling and bold brush style seems to swallow up the page with darkness in a kind of warm and muddy embrace, allowing for moods that can turn from vacant to deep, from tormented to mirthful, and back again. His lettering lilts, shouts, or murmurs with calligraphic affectation. His figures are cartooned with equal measures of real and imagined, so they can live in the imagination-land of dreams, pasts, or ghosts… or visions of flies or chickens or monsters. Yet Powell’s characters always bend back to a fleshy, supple substantialness, fully inhabiting their bodies with a studious animator’s particularity.
All that makes for the feeling, when in Powell’s hands, that what we know and how we live is both resilient/sinewy and fragile/fractured. In the service of Van Jensen’s carefully wrought story of many layers of corruption, this network of metaphorical ghosts and monsters in the mundanity of this Southern Gothic plot, Powell’s art style keeps the story throbbing with nervous energy, coiled tension, and the desperation of our search for goodness in a harsh world.
In this way, Jensen and Powell pull together not only a classic-feeling crime romp, but that “love letter, anchor, and reckoning” Powell talks about in Little Rock’s past. Genre fiction gives structures to certain sentiments and moods that look to be concretized from the spirit of a certain age or place. Jensen and Powell lace the characters and conflicts of “Two Dead” with the complex mixture that makes up Little Rock. As Kemp tells the Chief, “A bit of the Delta, a bit of the Midwest, a bit of Texas, all jumbled up.” And so, the horrors under the gentility, some go-west anti-authoritarianism aged into bitterness, and a cowboy arrogance all spin out in the interplay of Bailey, Esau, Kemp, Jacob, the mayor, and the mob.
Ultimately, “Two Dead” provides a solidly entertaining crime narrative, but one that readers looking for the further gifts of a distinctly set story will find satisfying as well.
