Fighting Crime Is Mundane, Terrible Work

Detective Tom Jensen spent a half a year interviewing Gary Ridgway in an effort to find victims of the Green River Killer whose bodies were never found. Now Jensen’s son, Entertainment Weekly writer Jeff Jensen, has written a comic book about his father’s time with Ridgway. Green River Killer: A True Detective Story is a black-and-white comic book (drawn by Jonathan Case) about those 188 days, with flashbacks to important points in Green River Killer history.

Jensen has clearly read his share of comic books. He avoids all the writerly traps of a first-time comics writer—his pages aren’t overly wordy; he trusts his artist to tell the story. And Case is a great artist to trust: He draws page after page of people doing undramatic things—eating, talking to each other, sitting at desks—keeping everything visually interesting without overdramatizing events with swooping “camera” angles and obnoxious stagey illustration tricks. If you’re looking for Sin City, or even Law & Order, this isn’t the comic for you.

The Ridgway in this comic isn’t a Hannibal Lecter figure; he’s a schlub who’s done monstrous things and doesn’t seem particularly bothered by it. The cops—thankfully, Dave Reichert is pushed way, way in the background, where he belongs—are everyday working guys who toss around rubber chickens to lighten the emotional weight of their jobs. They’re not Batman. They get frustrated. They fuck up, they get overwhelmed and disgusted with having to deal with Ridgway. Jensen keeps on message, holding himself out of the story about as much as possible, and trying to stick to the mundane horrors his fathers faced. Turns out, those horrors are more than enough to keep the reader’s interest. This is one of the best true crime comics I’ve read in a good long while.