Violent Cases


By Neil Gaiman & Dave McKean (Escape Books)
ISBN: 978-0-9509568-6-2

As this entire book is all about stories, memories, perception and self-deception, I’m concentrating on the original Escape Books release, although the tale has been re-issued a number of times. Moreover, difficult sod that I am, even though the artwork was created in a muted tonal colour-palette of blues, greys and browns, which were restored for those subsequent releases, I actually prefer the black and white version I first saw, so I’m going with that one rather than later, corrected as-the-artist-intended versions…

There’s actually very little to say about this enigmatic and compelling little teaser other than the basic facts.

Initially published by the aforementioned and sorely missed Escape outfit in 1987, it marks the first collaboration of two relatively unknown creators who shared a more literary aspiration for comics than traditional newcomers to the craft, married to a novel approach and genuine, raw, hungry storytelling talent.

It’s short, sweet, disturbing, utterly absorbing and probably impossible to translate into any other medium… and that is, of course, a Very Good Thing.

There’s this guy see, and he’s reminiscing about his childhood in the 1960s…

Years ago in Portsmouth a little lad hurt his arm rather badly whilst exchanging words about bedtime with his father. To fix the problem daddy took the 4-year old to see an osteopath. The elderly gentleman was an interesting fellow with an accent who told great yarns and mentioned that he had once treated somebody famous…

As the narrator tries to sort out the half-forgotten details – fragments of life and films and games congealed now with clearly conflated circumstances – the facts, fictions and shadily obscured misunderstandings concerning his difficult childhood, growing maturity and awareness and those hours with Al Capone’s bone-bender begin to emerge and coalesce… or do they?

Flickering back and forth, the narrative proffers a miasma of mixed memories and misapprehensions involving a memorably troubled old man, Men in Dark Suits, a party, a magician, unexplained appearances and subsequent disappearances, unforgettable physical discomfort as a young arm was coaxed back into correctitude, tales of tailors and gangsters and Tommy Guns… which were always carried in Violent Cases…

Most of all it deals with unsolvable mysteries – because even the things we recall, we don’t always remember…

Complete with an Alan Moore Introduction, this slight but unforgettable pictorial memento mori – or is that topica tragoedia? – beguiles and enchants and subtly distresses in ways no lover of the comics medium could possibly resist.

If you haven’t read it, you must. If you have, read it again – it’s not at all what you remember…
© 1987 Neil Gaiman & Dave McKean.