Introduction

When the Chicago-based filmmaker and musician David Carlson first heard about the life of his colleague’s father Matt Rizzo, he was captivated by its twists and turns. It was almost impossible to believe, but here it was a true story, as the authors would later semi-ironically add to the title. The family story was told in a small diner in Chicago, while the two were working together on a street opera about the history and culture of the local neighborhood. It was bizarre for two reasons. As it turned out, Charlie’s father served his prison sentence together with the infamous Nathan Leopold, one of the two murderers who committed the ‘Crime of the Century’ in 1924. The then-nineteen year-old Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb, wealthy and prodigious students from respectful families residing on Chicago’s South Side and attending the University of Chicago, kidnapped and killed fourteen-year-old Bobby Frank, leaving his dead, mutilated body in a culvert. The two young men aspired to commit a ‘perfect crime’ that would remain unsolved and thus prove their intellectual superiority. However, due to unpredicted complications, Leopold and Loeb were identified, tracked down, interrogated, and found guilty of murder. After a long trial, Leopold and Loeb were sentenced to life imprisonment plus 99 years. Some years into Leopold’s sentence, Matt Rizzo, Charlie Rizzo’s father, met him in the Stateville prison, and Leopold would end up playing a significant role in Rizzos’ life. While in prison, Leopold saved Matt from committing suicide and contributed to his later reintegration into civilian life by teaching him how to read Braille. ‘I think of Nathan Leopold as someone who saved my father’s life,’ Charlie mentions in one of the interviews. ‘Frankly, if it wasn’t for Nathan Leopold, I would not be sitting here today’ (Shefsky, 2017: n. pag). The graphic novel based on Charlie’s testimonies, David Carlson and Landis Blair’s The Hunting Accident: A True Story of Crime and Poetry (2017), offers a gripping reading of Leopold’s popular avatar, adding another dimension to his character, while shedding some of its congenial traits.

The contrast between popular media portrayals in the last century of Leopold and Loeb as cold-blooded thrill killers and the more humane rendering of Leopold in Charlie Rizzo’s story served as a creative spur for Carlson. Addressing Matt Rizzo’s imprisonment, he underscores its paradoxical strand: ‘in his darkest moment, the tiniest bit of light that came to him, was through the darkest criminal in the entire country at that time in history, a thrill-killer named Nathan Leopold’ (Carroll, 2022: n. pag). In it, a series of visual metaphors depict the clash between these two contrasting representations, as the image of Leopold progresses from a figure of a big dark monster hunting children to a disturbed adult who is not blind to human suffering. This shifting imagery stands for the historical development that the Leopold-Loeb case has undergone in the US-American public consciousness. Researchers like Paula Fass (1993) and later Edward Larson (2010) trace significant temporal shifts in the criminals’ narrative identities from the conception of the murder in 1924 to the present. Their public image has morphed from ‘self-conceived Nietzschean supermen’ (Fass 1993: 925) to a ‘Fitzgeraldesque type of youth’ (ibid: 926), and, ultimately, to troubled children, traumatized by their social environment and upbringing. Also addressed in earlier re-readings like those found in the novel Never the Sinner (1985) by John Logan and the film Swoon (1992), directed by Tom Kalin, the queer interpretation of Leopold and Loeb as closeted homosexuals and lovers in Carlson and Blair’s The Hunting Accident adds another dimension to the story. As biofiction, the work functions as a metacommentary on the century-long process of cultural recontextualization that ‘the crime of the century’ has underwent. In contrast to historical novels that focus on the representation of historical landscape as habitus, biofiction is believed to ‘foreground individuals’ ability to prevail over their (often hostile) environments’ (Boldrini et al 2025:6), which is in tune with the progressive logic that The Hunting Accident applies to its protagonists.

The Hunting Accident intricately engages with these multifaceted identities, appropriating the popularity of Leopold’s public image to dramatize the private life of gangster Matt Rizzo, who was blinded in an attempted robbery and sentenced to four and a half years in Stateville, Chicago in 1935. After being placed in a bug cell in the panopticon-like Stateville prison, Rizzo got to know Leopold, who had already spent 12 years of his sentence together with fellow murderer Richard Loeb, who was killed by an inmate shortly before Rizzo’s arrival. The last generation that connects a hundred-year-old tragedy with the present is represented through Matt’s son Charlie Rizzo, who unwittingly finds himself reenacting his father’s mistake as a juvenile delinquent. When of a similar age that Nathan Leopold and Matt Rizzo were when they committed their crimes, Charlie joins his friends in an attempted burglary. However, upon discovering the truth about his father’s criminal past, Charlie begins to grasp the tragic irony of his position. All this time, Matt was lying to his son about his blindness, using a made-up story of a ‘hunting accident’ as a cover-up for his criminal past. Recognizing in his present actions the repetition of his father’s past, Charlie’s future transpires as a reenactment of Matt’s path to redemption. Novid Pars (2017) traces the temporal reversibility of The Hunting Accident by calling it ‘a journey that reveals how the sins of a son can be redeemed, in the fullness of time, by those of a father.’ Incidentally, Matt’s story ends up serving as a token of Nathan Leopold’s own efforts to ‘redeem himself,’ as his role in teaching Braille to Matt was used in one of the testimonies that advocated for Leopold’s release at his parole hearings in 1958. Very early in the story, the characters mirror each other to such a degree that their lives present as variations of the same parable: the universal story of ‘crime and poetry.’ Abstracting the singularity of the fact to the level of a common denominator while constituting the principle of fiction renders the individual stories more feasible and thus, paradoxically, more ‘real.’

Molding Identities

The Hunting Accident narrates the story of three twelve-year-old boys, Matt, Messina, and Enzo. Messina steals a shotgun from his father, and together they embark on an adventure in a forest near the swamps where Bobby Frank had been murdered in 1924 by the notorious Leopold and Loeb duo. The boys are eager to hunt down a deer, but one of them, while trying to aim at the animal, mistakenly fires the gun in Matt’s face, blinding him (Figure 1). At this crucial moment in the narrative, Matt’s eyes are covered by the two black boogeymen shadows of Leopold and Loeb, his body partially stuck in a culvert, similar to how and where Bobby Frank’s body was found. This image is graphically juxtaposed to a similar scene, depicted some pages prior, where two shadows spill acid on Bobby’s body, referring to Leopold and Loeb’s attempt to cover the boy’s identity. In 1925, the narrator informs readers, ‘Leopold and Loeb were the boogeymen of every young boy’s nightmares’ (ibid). This visual metaphor creates a structural parallel between Matt and Bobby, both victims of a teenage duo of perpetrators. In the ‘true story,’ the young Matt Rizzo befriends local youth in Chicago after being forced to leave his parents’ house at the age of fifteen and live as a homeless person for some time. One of the young men, Messina, recruits Matt and another boy to rob a shop. The plan backfires, and the shop owner shoots Messina dead, while the second shot hits Matt in the face and blinds him. Many years later, two friends coax Matt’s son Charlie to rob a house.

Figure 1

The Hunting Accident (15, © David L. Carlson 2017).

The Hunting Accident juxtaposes three main stories that rhythmically unroll in patterns. The dynamic between what at this point can be defined as Propp-like archetypes is always the following: three characters, among whom one is a ‘villain’ who develops the plan and, with an accomplice, tempts the protagonist to join them in committing a crime. The reluctant accomplice eventually ‘loses himself’ (his life, freedom, etc.) and/or is bound to seek redemption later in life. Loeb and Leopold lure Bobby Frank into the car and kill him in Chicago in 1924; Messina and Bird encourage Matt to commit robbery in the same city in 1935; Steve and Dominic talk Charlie into burglary years later. The stories echo each other in the similarity of their plot, in the interaction of the three characters, and through the recursive narrative layout of the work. Additionally, the shadows in Figure 1 refer to the initial newspaper sensationalism around Leopold and Loeb as ‘arrogant Nietzschean criminals’ (Fass 1993: 936) that gradually devolved into a ghost story for children. ‘Ironically, the very historicity of an event made it vulnerable to fictionalization,’ Fass (1993) concludes about the Leopold-Loeb case and its fictionalization through later reworkings in popular culture (945).

The avatars of the two murderers as frightening, amorphous creatures forms a powerful contrast with how we later meet them in Matt’s recollections of his actual life in prison. The first and only panel in the graphic novel featuring Loeb shows his mutilated body on the bathroom floor, as he was murdered and ‘cut in ribbons’ by a fellow prisoner (Carlson and Blair, 2017:140). Very soon afterwards, readers encounter his partner in crime Leopold in tears, mourning his lover’s death (ibid:149). In the re-telling of the story, Nathan Leopold’s image is re-branded: he acquires a frail stature and a sensitive character. Leopold is moody and often short-tempered, but his intelligence and passion to learn and teach others makes him appear kind-hearted.

Matt’s recollection of Leopold aligns with the later reconsiderations of the dynamic between Richard Loeb and Nathan Leopold in press and fiction. If Leopold was originally painted as a ruthless and mad genius, who negatively influenced the kind-hearted Loeb, their roles were starkly reversed after Loeb’s death and the publication of two influential books, the biofictional novel Compulsion (1956) by Meyer Levin and the above-mentioned autobiography Life plus 99 Years (1958) by Leopold. Both books rely on testimonies and, in the case of Levin’s Compulsion, on extensive research of the well-documented trial process and case documents, such as Hulbert-Bowman’s reports and confessions. Eventually, the narrative shifted the focus on Loeb, now turned into ‘the villain, who lured an innocent Leopold, “a quiet, studious, serious, very gentle boy,” to commit murder’ (Fass 1993: 946) (original italics). Leopold is the protagonist in Carlson and Blair’s graphic novel. Like Matt who was lured into criminal activity by Messina and Charlie after him who was persuaded by Steve to commit a crime, Nathan is seduced by a more charismatic, mischievous young man, Loeb. Incidentally, the three seducers eventually lose their lives to the very passion that drew them to break the law. Whereas both Messina and Steve were reported by the authors to find their deaths in criminal affairs, the reasons of Loeb’s death triggered various speculations of similar nature.

Universal Men

As The Hunting Accident unfolds, the stylistic and contextual approximation of the narrative identities intensifies. Initially pigeonholed as criminals on their shared ‘path to redemption,’ Leopold and the Rizzos eventually acquire the status of ‘universal men,’ which is metaphorically embedded through multiple references to the Western literary cannon.

Throughout the graphic novel, black shadows are used as a metaphor for several different concepts and people, including Matt himself. As argued above, the individual life stories are braided into a spiral of the same pattern and end up close to losing their singularity. In Figure 2, the metaphor of the shadow increases in symbolic value. The image of a figure wrapped in the tongues of canonical Western writers whose labelled busts are aligned below it suggests how one’s amorphous self is shaped by the power of the ‘voices’ that have spoken to the many and, in their own creative way, carried messages of ‘universal truth’. Spending his time in prison, Matt gains access to classic Western literature with the help of Leopold, who teaches him Braille and provides him with books to read. Matt soon becomes acquainted with John Keats’ idea of the ‘truth of imagination,’ which proclaims the leading role of human affections in grasping the godly truth of being. In his letter to Benjamin Bailey (1817), Keats expresses a belief that imagination is crucial in acquiring kinds of truth that reason fails to grasp (Ryan 1973: 264). In the context of the biofictional graphic novel, the ‘truth of imagination’ serves as an authorial framework for conflating narratives in a densely intertwined landscape. In it, Matt’s story morphs into Dante’s story, while Leopold turns into Virgil in the metaphorical inferno of their prison life. As the historical epochs merge, fact and fiction lose their ontological difference, which is further graphically flattened in the act of drawing.

Figure 2

The Hunting Accident (39, © David L. Carlson 2017).

In their analysis of the interconnection between memory and style in comics, Maaheen Ahmend and Benoît Crucifix (2018) highlight the role of graphiation in reconciling collective and personal memory in comics via recurrent images and drawing styles (2), so that histories, through their graphic embodiment, become themselves ‘stylized.’ (284). In The Hunting Accident, the act of (re-)drawing events in a homogenous graphic style loosens a strategic difference between the characters. While dramatically accentuating stylistic aspects in the narrative, be it extensive cross-hatching or complex visual design, the work’s illustrator Landis Blair consistently renders the faces of the leading characters schematic and simple, in some instances alluding to their structural interchangeability. ‘The story of my father began long before Dante, or Plato, or Homer. It’s everyman’s story and it is still being told today,’ concludes the character of Charlie Rizzo (Carlson and Blair 2017: 428). In his autobiography Life plus 99 Years (1958), Leopold recalls the defense speech by Clarence Darrow, Leopold and Loeb’s attorney, who ‘was pleading not so much for Dick and me as he was pleading for the human race’ (Leopold 1958: 75). These aesthetics dictate Carlson’s vision of artistic imagination, which he defines to be ‘as authentic as any fact we can describe’ (Carlson 2022). The truth in biofiction, then, is the ‘truth of what it is to be a human being’ (Banks qtd. in Lackey 2021: 2). This resonates with the famous, albeit controversial, reader-response theory advanced by Scott McCloud in Understanding Comics (1993), according to which simplified cartoony visuals facilitates readers’ identification with the characters. As Charles Hatfield (2022) points out, this potential for organic identification in comics runs contrary to McCloud’s concept of an engaged reader as an ‘accomplice’ and ‘partner in crime’ (269) in the active process of meaning-making. What does it mean for us to identify with a criminal such as Leopold, and to what extent can the framework of ‘universal experience’ help us ethically engage with the topic?

Bildungsroman

To address this issue without instantly falling into the trap of moral relativism, I want to focus on the pragmatic function of this rhetoric. The clearly atemporal trope of a ‘universal man’ does not serve as an end in itself but rather opens the perceived fixed/preconditioned identity of a criminal to historical change. The Hunting Accident bears many traits of a Bildungsroman, such as focusing on a protagonist’s personal development from naïve not-knowing to self-discovery and maturation painted against the backdrop of social and historical conditioning (as shaping/Bildung) (Earle 2014: 431). The idea that social milieu and family upbringing play a decisive role in shaping children’s personalities gained in momentum at the times of Bobby Frank’s murder, and was widely discussed by commentators on the Leopold-Loeb case. In light of renewed anxieties around the precariousness of American childhood of the 1950s, Leopold restates the same idea in his autobiography. Nathan introduces his hypothesis of ‘hereditary environment,’ in which parents’ role in a child’s development is ‘paramount’ (Leopold 1958: 214). In The Hunting Accident, this point is exemplified by Charlie’s deep emotional connection to his father, which helped him drift away from his criminogenic social background. Leopold counts a lack of a connection to positive role models as among the biggest risk factors for juvenile delinquency, as ‘a kid (…) is the greatest conformist in the world. There is nothing worse than being a sissy; he’s got to do, and do enthusiastically, whatever the rest of the kids are doing’ (ibid: 213-214). ‘Steve Garza was the coolest kid in the neighborhood,’ Charlie recalls of his early teenage days (Carlson and Blair 2017: 33). ‘All those years I was riding the rails, Messina had been busy making a name for himself,’ Matt recalls when telling his son how he was dragged into the burglary (ibid: 120). In tune with the Rizzos’ stories, Leopold laconically addresses his own motivation in his autobiography: ‘My motive […] was to please Dick. Just that—incredible as it sounds. I thought so much of the guy that I was willing to do anything…’ (Leopold 1958: 50).

In Figure 3, Matt (on the left) and Leopold (on the right) are sitting in mirroring poses, wearing the same prison uniform and sporting the same glasses. They are both facing the identical shadows of their fathers, whose abuse and lack of proper support prompted feelings of disheartenment in their sons. On the opposite sides of the unbridgeable gulf dictated by class and wealth, their experiences seem to oddly overlap, as the laws of social conditioning are shown to transcend individual differences. Here, the character of Leopold is shown to be shaped by his social milieu (i.e. bad parental influence and friendship with Richard Loeb) for the purpose of fitting his image into the progressive logic of the Bildungsroman, the genre that Leopold exploited in his autobiography.

Figure 3

The Hunting Accident (352, © David L. Carlson 2017).

As biofiction, The Hunting Accident aims at mobilizing a historical past as a backdrop for present issues, making the genre essentially political (Lackey 2021: 33-60). In the above-mentioned introduction to Leopold’s autobiography, Erle Stanley Gardner decries the public treatment that the case had been receiving for more than 30 years after the trial. Not only is it futile to try getting ‘even’ with a criminal, suggests Gardner—at this point, it is not even about Leopold anymore. What is at stake is the whole conception of rehabilitation in the penitentiary system. The Loeb and Leopold case revived discussions about the nature and purpose of correctional institutions, as Darrow’s famous defense speech spared the two from receiving the death penalty, much anticipated by the public. For Darrow and Gardner, as for many commentators after them, the discourse that society would decide to adopt toward the case essentially served as a litmus test in humanity. As if in dialogue with Margaret Atwood’s Hag-Seed (2016), Matt Rizzo’s story poignantly bespeaks how rehabilitation can help re-integrate former prisoners. Most of the events in The Hunting Accident take place in Chicago and its vicinity. Eventually, the neighbourhood of Little Italy, where Matt used to live, as well as the panopticon form of the prison, serve as a stage for the reenactment of Dante’s Inferno, with Matt as its co-director and a leading actor.¹ This built-in parable of Inferno, played out by Matt and Leopold in prison, accentuates the graphic novel’s performative aspect, hinting at the metalevel of its creation.

David Carlson met Charlie Rizzo when they both worked on a non-profit street opera called Opera-Matic. The project was co-founded by Carlson and focuses on creative ‘place making’: ‘It’s great to see people develop a greater sense of home when they know the rich history of their streets,’ Carroll (2016) comments on the project’s premise. Framed as endorsing ‘opportunities for joyful civic engagement’ and ‘participation in social change’ (About), the art project is co-funded by the Chicago Fund for Safe and Peaceful Communities, aimed at ‘violence prevention and reduction’ through supporting community-based organizations (About the Found). Some episodes in The Hunting Accident allude to its roots in Carroll’s project, such as the scene with the shadow screen on the train in chapter VIII called ‘Plato’s Cave.’ This activist strain of The Hunting Accident manifests itself in the performative aesthetic of the graphic novel, where the claims of truth and reliability are problematized as springing from communicative contexts and rooted in interpersonal relations.

Performing the Truth

In Performativity, Cultural Construction, and the Graphic Narrative (2020), Leigh Anne Howard Susanna and Hoeness-Krupsaw frame the performative aspect in comics as a pragmatic tool for social change, focusing on the aesthetics of movement as ‘calling action into being’ (8). Differentiating between various types of performativity based on theirrelation to the depicted world, the editors eventually suggest that graphic narratives can ‘fake’ reality, ‘create understanding of the familiar and problematic,’ or ‘offer an alternative way of seeing and being in the world’ (9). Representing a new generation of graphic novels, The Hunting Accident is framed by the logic of performative truth² that aligns with a metamodern project that ‘seeks to overcome postmodern distances so as to recreate a sense of wholeness that allows positive change both locally and globally’ (Yousef 2017:37). This approach departs from the residual preoccupation with the metaphysical nature of ‘objectivity’ of representation and truth claims, as the latter were playfully overthrown in the ironic twists and forgeries of the (auto)biofictional graphic narratives in the 1980s and 1990s. In The Hunting Accident, truth claims are often shown as being pragmatically informed and actively performed rather than (un)faithfully recreated. This principle pertains not only to the metanarrative level of the work’s creation; it also manifests on the level of narrator/character. Take, for instance, Matt’s lie to his son that structures the whole narrative (Figure 4). The story about Matt losing his sight in a hunting accident was meant to explain Matt’s blindness to his then ten-year-old son Charlie without undermining Charlie’s trust in the father he barely knew: ‘The truth is that you needed to feel safe,’ Matt replies to his son’s later accusations. The ontological clash between the two stories, one of the actual crime and imprisonment and the other of the hunting accident, is resolved within a wider framework of what Matt calls ‘higher truth.’

Figure 4

The Hunting Accident (89, © David L. Carlson 2017).

On the face of it, the peritext in the title The Hunting Accident: A True Story of Crime and Poetry ironically plays out the ontological ambiguity between a “parable [not veridical]: a true story [veridical],” further schematized by the juxtaposition of “crime” [history] and “poetry” [fiction]. This dichotomy underlies what Karen Ferreira-Meyers (2015) terms as auto(bio)fictional pact ³—an onomastic pact, according to which an existing historical personality (author) and their narrative counterparts (narrator and/or protagonist) bear the same name, while the peritext (such as title, genre, etc.) contains explicit reference to the work’s nature as fiction. Auto- and biofictional pacts are common in graphic narratives, since the generic term ‘graphic novel,’ customarily used for large-sized non-serial works, alludes to their default status as fiction. The front-page title of The Hunting Accident is paired with the innuendo on the back cover reading, ‘It was a hunting accident—that much Charlie is sure of’ (Carlson and Blair 2017), while the authors define it as ‘a graphic novel based on the true story’ (Home Page, n.pag). Soon, this framing becomes superfluous: neither is the hunting accident fully fictitious, nor is the ‘real’ story of Matt’s life in prison fully factual. The hunting accident, and later his unpublished manuscript The Crucial Hint: A Text on Revelation, are framed as Matt’s attempts to communicate with his son, for which he creates or relies on parables, metaphors, and comparisons. This way, Matt creates a broad vocabulary, appropriating fictional stories and personal encounters with Leopold. While seeking to explain contemporary literature’s palpable preoccupation with the past, Amir Eshel (2013) outlines his concept of futurity as the principle that drives literature to engage with the past in order to eventually transcend it in the service of the future. This strive is realized through ‘widen[ing] the language and expand[ing] the pool of idioms we employ in making sense of what has occurred while imagining whom we may become’ (5). This perspective does not necessarily trivialize the issue of lying. Matt is an unreliable narrator, whose lies ruin his marriage and later undermine his son’s trust. At the same time, Matt feels forced to carefully narrate his life in order to integrate it into the social landscape, as the Other (his family and community) functions as its structuring principle.

Here, the father-son dynamic of negotiating the truth claims highlights their discursive quality. If Charlie did not eventually ‘decide’ to believe in his father’s explanations, the whole semantic architecture of Matt’s philosophy would fall apart. We see that in Max Turner’s analysis of a story from One Thousand and One Nights, where Shahrazad defies her father’s advice, disguised as the parable of the donkey and the ox, in which she does not validate the parallels between the parable and her position in real life (Turner 1996: 311). The Hunting Accident illustrates this principle in an unequivocal scene whereby Matt and Leopold prepare an adaptation of Inferno for Leopold’s correspondence school. Matt’s logic is straightforward: for the convicts to understand the old text, they need to be able to ‘recognize’ themselves in it, which would help them grasp the ‘universal’ relevance of classic literature. To this end, Matt draws parallels between different sins and actual crimes committed by other prisoners in the anticipated audience. This mental exercise culminates in an ironic scene in which Matt gives the perplexed Leopold hints about who may belong to the last circle of hell, reserved for treachery. For Matt, it is Leopold and Loeb’s story that fits perfectly: Loeb betrayed the trust of his lover. Leopold fervently denies this interpretation, brushing off any ‘moral lesson’ that such comparison entails. As a single historical event is devoid of symbolical content as of itself, its coming into being in speech invokes complex syntax. It then requires an active reader’s participation to legitimize this ontological hybrid as reality. Eventually, one may also actively police the status of fiction as non-reality.

Likewise, we can have motivations to actively seek traces of referential discourse in fiction. In the Introduction to Leopold’s book, Stanley Gardner sums it up neatly: ‘The trouble is, it’s impossible to generalize. These days one can take any example of fictitious crime, and someone can come up with a newspaper account saying, “That’s the specific crime he’s talking about”’ (Leopold 1958: 12). The idea of pure fiction is immanently incoherent, Lackey states in American Biographical Novel (2016), as any ‘pure’ act of detached imagining is rooted in the historicity of its author’s experience (Lackey, 2016, pp.30-31). This hybrid ontology of referential and fictional discourses in biofiction produces new interpretative frameworks based on the principles of metonymy and metaphor. For this reason, the continuous rewriting of the Leopold-Loeb story is possible in the first place—different cultural frameworks succeed in appropriating historical data, incorporating and reframing some of it and leaving out the rest. We see the same mechanism at work in The Hunting Accident, as the authors employ generic conventions of the Bildungsroman and melodrama to paint the portrait of Leopold, ‘anchoring’ it by employing empirical and historical components (Lackey 2021: 35–36) to make the character ‘historically’ recognizable.

The overarching trope here is the path of redemption through storytelling, the story of Matt and Charlie Rizzo as told by themselves. This trope necessitates coherent progression, from the moment the crime was committed to the point that marks the hero’s full rehabilitation. The big fire that is depicted near the end of The Hunting Accident, when Nathan sets the books in the library on fire, is used as a metaphor for the purifying fire. At the end of the scene, Matt learns that Inferno is only the first part of Dante’s journey. Eventually, the graphic novel depicts the ‘after story’ of Matt and Charlie as leading meaningful lives, filled with newly found purposes. Leopold seems to live the same story: ‘How can I picture the arrogant monster I was at nineteen?’ Leopold ponders in his autobiography, alluding to the sensationalist narrative of early newspaper reports on the case. He cannot lay out the crime before the reader, which would entail sharing ‘the viewpoint of the insufferable creature I once was, a creature I hope I have long since ceased to be’ (Leopold 1958: 20). This neatly framed narrative aligns with a widely publicized image of Leopold as an exemplary ‘reformed man.’ But, how much of it is ‘true’?

Two Leopolds

In contrast to the character Nathan Leopold, who eventually sheds tears realizing that he was indeed betrayed by his close friend, the historical Leopold would keep Richard Loeb’s portrait in his house even after leaving prison, to his late wife’s irritation (Rebain 2023: 263). Leopold’s autobiography was published while he was waiting for his parole hearings in 1958, and it contains vast omissions, fully ignoring references to his life before the crime. In his comprehensive study Arrested Adolescence: The Secret Life of Nathan Leopold (2023), Erik Rebain offers a completely different image of Leopold, specifically concentrating on these omissions: his life before and after prison. Rebain finishes his extensive overview of Leopold’s life with a grim verdict: ‘He may not have killed again, but fundamentally he remained the same as the teenager who had murdered Bobby Frank on that sunny May afternoon in 1924’ (Rebain 2023: 265). One of the scenes in The Hunting Accident features the stanza from Alfred Housman, quoted in Darrow’s defense speech, which reads: ‘There is nothing but the night’ (2016 [1924]). In the graphic novel, this quote signals the moment of despair which the Rizzo characters eventually overcome. Darrow’s strategy, however, was less to appeal to the belief in redemption of Richard and Nathan, for whom, ‘So far as I am concerned, it is over’ (ibid.), but rather to endorse a more progressive jurisdictional practice that would save the lives of his rich clients.

This tension between Leopold in Arrested Adolescence and the Leopold in The Hunting Accident illustrates the underlying gap between two different theories of crime adopted by the authors. The social learning theory that generates potential for the progressive discourse of crime prevention and subsequent rehabilitation (Akers 1990) runs contrary to the more individual focus on psychopathy in Leopold’s personality development adopted by Rebain. The latter framework leaves little space for the potential amelioration of psychopathy later in life by concentrating on the individual peculiarities of a person’s constitution, rather than on external conditions (Moore 2011). This explains Rebain’s insistence on the constancy of Leopold’s psychic state as arrested, notwithstanding his performative ‘goodness’ in public. This is not to suggest that the progressive logic of change cannot be applied to a pathological criminal. This is exactly the path that Harriet Earle (2014) takes in her analysis of My Friend Dahmer (2012), the graphic novel about serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer, a.k.a. ‘Milwaukee Cannibal,’ which she categorizes as a Bildungsroman. Still narrating the journey of ‘becoming,’ it is dictated by the reverse dynamic between the individual and their community, marked by the character’s progressive alienation. In a similar fashion, Rebain outlines his biographical project as ‘tracing the steps Leopold took to get from stealing stamps to murdering a teenager in cold blood’ (3).

This discrepancy between the life trajectories of Leopold and the Rizzos, which the graphic novel seeks to overcome, can be exemplified by the above-mentioned parallel between Nathan and Matt’s negligent parents. This trope does not align with the documented accounts of the above-mentioned relationship between Nathan and his father. Although we repeatedly encounter scenes where Nathan Leopold Sr visits his son during the prison arc, the former died in 1929, long before Matt was sentenced to his prison term. Moreover, as Leopold’s testimonies and Hulbert-Bowman reports show, the relationship between the two was far from tense, with Nathan recalling his father’s visits with warmth. Earle highlights the same parent-child dynamic in Dahmer’s family, where Dahmer himself claimed ‘he was never treated with anything other than love and affection’ (429). Introducing Leopold’s father to match Matt’s story reinforces the link between the two men, which frames Leopold within the social learning theory as conditioned by his environment and thus potentially mendable. Leopold Sr’s criticism of his son’s affection for Loeb serves as an extradiegetic commentary on Nathan’s resistance to forsake his ‘hero’ – a symbolic act that would set him free from the ‘prison of mind,’ which young Charlie later undergoes with the help of his father. At the same time, Leopold, himself devoid of his father’s support, is put in a quasi-parental position to Matt, for whom the former plays the roles of teacher and mentor.

Leaving Traces

The narrative approximation of Leopold and the Rizzos in The Hunting Accident can be read as part of a wider social process of performing cultural memory for present community purposes, which in this case means integrating Leopold’s image within a progressive public discourse of personal redemption and social (re-)integration. However, the communicative memory of Leopold as preserved by the Rizzo family is centered around a more basic feeling of reciprocation, which is evident from Charlie’s words of appreciation toward Leopold in the context of his friendship with Matt. In his biofictional novel Dancer (2003), Irish author Colum McCann narrates the popular historical figure of Rudolf Nureyev through the eyes of a side character, since for McCann, what matters most is the story of his ‘working class friend’ and his experience of being influenced by the acclaimed dancer, as ‘never again will a single story be told as if it were the only one’ (Lackey, M and McCann, C 2018: 137). In his interviews, Charlie Rizzo recounts the promise given to his father to preserve Matt’s story and his work, which came about through Leopold’s initial assistance and guidance. In one of the prison’s scenes, Matt is listening to an old Bach vinyl that Leopold’s father brought for his son, when Matt is suddenly approached by a prison pastor. ‘Did you know that the world would never have known his [Bach] music if it weren’t for his son?’ he asks Matt. ‘To think, all his work might have been tossed in the garbage. Interesting story, no?’ (Carlson and Blair 2017: 310) This meta-commentary points outside of the immediate connection between Matt and his son. Joshua Rivera starts his review of the book as follows: ‘If you know the name Nathan Leopold, it’s likely because of the boy he killed.’ He later adds, ‘The Hunting Accident is about the remarkable life he saved (Rivera 2017).’ If Matt’s relation to Nathan in The Hunting Accident is framed around at least partial identification, Charlie’s connection to Leopold is mediated and manifests itself as a symbolic function. The worldview that Matt passes on to his son is largely drawn from Leopold’s ‘prison classes’, be it Keats’ ‘truth of imagination’, ‘prison of mind’, and even quotes from Aeneid – in every bit of his father’s wisdom Charlie will later discern the echo of Leopold’s words.

The Hunting Accident epitomizes this dynamic, in which a lot of stylistic elements and plot features are drawn on the historical and/or fictionalized accounts of Leopold. In one of the episodes, Nathan mocks Matt, asking whether he lost his vision in a hunting accident, thus alluding to the title of the graphic novel. Ironically, when the police officers first visited the Leopold family home after the murder, his father suspected Nathan of hunting the birds in the forest preserve: ‘…it’s probably something about your shooting birds’ (Leopold 1958: 30). What seemed to his father like an unfortunate hunting accident took a far more gruesome turn. Even Matt’s idea to commit suicide from the top floor of the prison gallery turns out to be far from original: ‘It might be considerably easier […] to take a parole from the top gallery. Death would be almost certain and almost certainly instantaneous,’ Leopold recounts his thoughts about suicide (ibid.: 105). The first thing readers see in the book is the picture of eyeglasses. One acquainted with the popular imagery of ‘The Crime of the Century’ will soon recognize them as the very same fateful pair that Leopold dropped at the crime scene. Ironically, all three characters would wear glasses at some point in time, but none of the historical figures whom these characters represent needed glasses. ‘What a fluke!’ Leopold exclaims describing the investigation process in his book, ‘For I didn’t wear glasses’ (Leopold 1958: 27). If one looks at the archival photos of the young Leopold, as well as early comics adaptations, one will not see him wearing them⁴. Matt’s glasses also serve not to reveal the outer world for their owner, but for him to hide his blindness. This imagery is fully articulated by Charlie, who would sometimes wear glasses as a teenager: ‘Sunglasses: sometimes I wore these when I was out with my father because it felt like I could hide behind them’ (p. 55). The glasses eventually turn into a symbol that acquires a life of its own, and readers can see Carlson and Blair wearing similarly shaped glasses for their book promotion events.

Through the Eyes of the Blind

Multiple visual metaphors eventually reveal the constructedness of characters’ representations. To further quote McCann: ‘character is enormously important, but it is secondary to language because language makes the character’ (Lackey, M and McCann, C 2018: 140). In the case of graphic narratives, ‘language’ would stand for a toolset of medium-specific techniques through which a character comes into being. Despite having a firsthand experience with Leopold, Matt never ‘saw’ him, since Rizzo fully lost his vision before arriving in prison. Matt’s blindness is visually communicated by intense cross-hatching, as The Hunting Accident was fully drawn by Landis Blair in black and white. The darkness of the panels, created by the cross-hatching that leaves out small empty spaces, represents blindness not as simple blackness, but as a rather rich texture that changes in depth and density, creating dynamic fabrics into which images are woven. It also symbolizes a mystery yet (or never) to be uncovered. ‘For one thing, he never turned the lights on,’ Charles recalls living in his father’s apartment (Carlson and Blair 2017: 18). These words resonate with the pitch-black figure of his father, standing in the doorway, casting a shadow in the form of a traveler with a bindle—an autobiographical character from Matt Rizzo’s works named Scorto, while the apartment appears to a young Charlie ‘like a prison cell’ (ibid.: 20). Just as Leopold changes his graphic avatars throughout the work, so does Matt whose image constantly morphing from scene to scene. Far from being a mere transmitter, Matt is a storyteller who turned his own life into fiction.

Matt’s blindness serves not merely as a metaphor for a secret, an uncovered truth; it also highlights the role of a sense as a medium for transmitting and receiving information. As a blind writer, Matt had to resort to a complex algorithm of recording his thoughts. The panel in Figure 5 illustrates the long process of constant text re-coding: one phrase is shown in Braille as recited by Matt to a typist, whose task was to transcribe the recordings. After that, Charlie would read the printed version to his father: ‘I spent many hours reading back everything Mrs. Williams typed so my father could check the punctuation and capitalization’ (ibid: 35).

Figure 5

The Hunting Accident (34, © David L. Carlson 2017).

This routine serves as a complex visual metaphor for the way in which The Hunting Accident is narrated. Matt paints a portrait of his inmate, a man he never saw with his own eyes. Charlie, who hears the story, retells it to the future writer of his autobiography, whose purpose is to narrate his father’s life. Eventually, the image of Leopold becomes accessible to readers through the graphic re-imagining of the artist, who becomes the fourth link in the chain. In Figure 5, Matt writes a critical essay on one of the classic literary works. It is Matt’s creative interpretation of the original texts, which Charlie reads back to his father, just as it is the original story of Leopold, which Matt retells through the words and images of so many people after him. This meta-commentary on the constructedness of a biofictional narrative, based on precarious memories that are repeatedly retransmitted through different media and re-interpreted along the way, accentuates the interconnectivity of meaning creation, which presupposes multiple actors. ‘This story is an effort to revive the magic and wonder of the human experience, if only for a few hundred pages,’ Carlson (2022) states in one of the interviews.

Conclusion

If we try to link the fluid visual landscape of The Hunting Accident with the focus on performing experiences rather than representing identities, we can take a further step in reconciling the trope of the ‘universal experience’ in the graphic novel with Rebain’s vision of Leopold as an irredeemable criminal. Their point of intersection is Charlie’s appreciation of Leopold’s friendship with his father as a ‘little narrative’ in Lyotard’s terms, which does not necessarily spur a metonymical generalization of Leopold’s persona. In their article on moral pornography in comics, Pizarro and Baumeister (2013) talk about ‘judging people’ rather than ‘judging actions’ (15), advocating for a complex representational landscape for exercising moral judgements, which would account for perspectival shifts, such as ‘liars tell the truth most of the time’ (ibid.). According to the researchers, judging a character in the wider context of their actions implies a hard and ethically challenging endeavor that nonetheless proves to be more beneficial for community regulation: ‘predicting the future of interaction partners is far more relevant than passing judgment on their past actions.’ (ibid.) Once asked by Gardner, the question ‘Just what is society trying to do with Nathan Leopold?’ (Leopold 1958: 13) is symptomatic of a societal drive to reinterpret its past ethical frameworks to better describe the complexity of the present social reality.

Nina Mickwitz (2016) maps out the strategic potential of documentary comics in mobilizing the past for ‘orientating subject positions and informing understanding in the present,’ as well as dictating ‘decisions, agreements, and resolutions that in turn will hold implications for the future.’ (60) Such reinterpretation would have to incorporate Pizarro and Baumeister’s framework of a criminal, who does not look evil and does not always do evil. Derf Backderf, the author of My Friend Dahmer and Dahmer’s former classmate, addresses this duality as follows: ‘to you Dahmer was a depraved fiend, but to me he was a kid I sat next to in the study hall and hung out with him the band room.’ (qtd. in Earle 2014: 430) Leopold’s genius lies, however, in a more sophisticated dichotomy of a criminal, who mostly does good. In an interview about his biographic work in March (2013–2016), a graphic novel about the Civil Rights movement in the U.S., Nate Powell addresses the need for ‘evolving concepts’ of historical figures against the moral rigidness and lack of nuance in the mainstream public discourse. Talking about famous public activists that underwent cultural canonization, Powell states, that ‘the lionization flattens complex humans, like Dr. King, taking away the blemishes and the contradictions’ that include ‘massive personality conflicts’ (Velentzas 2021). This difference of interpretative frameworks lies at the heart of the ambiguity that surpasses the issue of veracity: aware of the smallest intimate details of Leopold’s life, the public and professional archivists seem preoccupied with a more general question: was Leopold a monster, ‘an unapologetic conman,’ a disturbed child, or, eventually, a ‘reformed man’? The Hunting Accident adds a valuable piece to what appears to be a big puzzle. As Leopold coyly states in his book, ‘Every human being, I suppose, is an infinitely complex mixture.’ (Leopold 1958: 293).

Editorial Note

This article is part of the Special Collection: Graphic Biographical Fiction, edited by Nancy Pedri and Maria Juko, with assistance from the editorial team.

Competing Interests

The author has no competing interests to declare.