Death
is an inevitability. All we can hope for when we die is to go with a
certain level of dignity intact. What most often robs people of that
opportunity is other people.
Other
fucking people...
We're
inundated and swaddled with horrific, undignified deaths on a daily
basis thanks to a constant fecal stream emanating from a journalistic
ethos more concerned with ratings than thoughtful, objective
reporting. As a culture we become stupefied and callous as we find
ourselves mixing up the name of the latest victim of brutality with
one who died mere months ago because the list keeps getting longer.
Every.
Goddam. Day.
But
organized barbarism sometimes pales in the face of the individual act
of savagery. Not only can people be horrible to other people, they
can exhibit a brutishness and inhumanity that enters uncharted
territory because they can, because they do, because they will.
Such
is the foundation for Emi Gennis' 2013 mini-comic The Unusual
Death of Gregory Biggs. Taken from the Wikipedia List of Unusual Deaths, this brief black and white comic details the horrific events
surrounding the 2001 death of Gregory Biggs at the hands of Chante
Jawan Mallard.
All
fucked up on Ecstacy and other substances, Ms. Mallard smashed her
speeding car into Mr. Biggs late one night on US 287, sending him
careening half-way through her windshield. In Gennis' telling of the
incident, Mallard then proceeded to drive home with Biggs still
partly on her passenger seat, alive and asking for help. Parking her
car in her garage, she proceeds have sex with her boyfriend, waiting
until 9 AM the next morning to do anything about Biggs. Mallard then
gets her boyfriend and his cousin to dispose of Biggs' body in a
public park.
Three
months later she jokingly refers to the incident at a party, and it
is then that a someone finally informs the police and Mallard gets
arrested for the crime.
While
the crime itself is loathsome and beastly, in Gennis' graphic
retelling, the images she creates of Biggs' last moments are what
give this comic its full emotional gravity. In a comic of only twelve
pages, devoting the entirety of one of those pages to this moment
could, in the hands of lesser artist, be gratuitous and pandering.
But Gennis' has a light touch with her heavy inks, and this page, as
it slowly darkens to black, demonstrates the potential of using
sequential art to tell a story. Each panel on the page flows
ponderously from the previous, slowing time as light fades dimmer and
dimmer, the crosshatching gets thicker, as Biggs' eyes are the last
bit of white on the page until the final panel is engulfed in total
darkness.
You
feel this death while looking at this page, the pain of it, the
slowness of it, but more importantly, the pointlessness of it.
Gennis
does try to show the momentary remorse that Mallard feels at the time
of the incident, but contrasted with Mallard's inaction and selfish
focus, Gennis gives us Mallard's sad face punctuated by hollow eyes.
As
a cartoonist, Gennis hits all the emotional beats in this story
perfectly, her art echoes our own disgust with what we are seeing.
The backmatter to this book informs us not only what ended up
happening to Mallard and her co-conspirators, but also describes in
detail many of the choices Gennis herself was faced with as an artist
trying to tell this story.
The
whole book is riveting because it is true, because of how its told,
and because it reminds us that there will always be those among us
who are boorish and savage and who think only of themselves no matter
what that means for our lives.
Or
for our deaths.
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