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A review by museoffire
The Borden Tragedy: A Memoir of the Infamous Double Murder at Fall River, Mass. 1892 by Rick Geary
3.0
This was an interesting little read. I'm not sure the graphic format is the first thing I'd think of as a way to tell some of the darkest, and most famous true crime stories in our history but Rick Geary might just be onto something if he could just trust his source material and perhaps work on his figure drawing just a tad.
We all know the rhyme;
Lizzie Border took an axe
and gave her mother forty wacks
When she saw what she had done
She gave her father forty-one
The murder of Abby and Andrew Borden has gone down as one of the most infamous unsolved mysteries in American history. It was a quiet morning in Fall River, Massachusetts when Abby and Andrew Borden were horrifically murdered by someone weilding an ax. It was Lizzie herself who discovered her father lying dead in his study on the couch she had previously helped him settle on when he returned from some business. Shortly after discovering him authorities discovered Lizzie's stepmother Abby also dead from a variety of brutal axe wounds in an upstairs bedroom.
Lizzie's subsequent arrest and trial were the sensation of the nation and though she was eventually acquitted of all charges history has not exactly been kind to her. While many felt there was indeed too much reasonable doubt to convict her the authorities were also never able to identify another suspect with the opportunity, motive or means of committing the murders.
Rick Geary chooses to tell his story with simplistic (sometimes overly) black and white drawings that sort of suggest MAD magazine cartoons. There's an unfinished quality to things as though he decided to publish early sketches rather then finished drawings. He also tries an understandable device of having a distant friend of Lizzie's narrate the story as though she's personally investigating what really happened. I get it, its meant to give a more personal touch to the narrative. It doesn't work primarily because we know nothing about this woman and Geary himself seems to sort of forget she's supposed to be telling the story. I would have been perfectly happy with just a straight retelling of the story without a mary sue being shoehorned in.
I definitely learned some interesting little tidbits about a case that is, if nothing else, very intriguing. Lizzie and her family lived a very complicated and combative life and had she been born in another time she would have benefitted greatly from some kind of therapeutic intervention and perhaps a career to use her many (repressed) talents and energy. Instead she lived a life of stifling propriety with a father too cheap and autocratic to give his daughters the opportunity of at least a pleasurable life despite a vast fortune that could have made them all comfortable and happy.
Is it possible that Lizzie simply lost it? Stifled for too long under her father's endless rules and restrictions and increasingly wrathful over his clear intentions to give much of her inheritence to his new wife's family? Yes it is. But its equally possible that she was simply the most convenient person to lay the blame on for a group of investigators who did a shoddy job at best and simply had to arrest someone.
I guess we'll never know....
We all know the rhyme;
Lizzie Border took an axe
and gave her mother forty wacks
When she saw what she had done
She gave her father forty-one
The murder of Abby and Andrew Borden has gone down as one of the most infamous unsolved mysteries in American history. It was a quiet morning in Fall River, Massachusetts when Abby and Andrew Borden were horrifically murdered by someone weilding an ax. It was Lizzie herself who discovered her father lying dead in his study on the couch she had previously helped him settle on when he returned from some business. Shortly after discovering him authorities discovered Lizzie's stepmother Abby also dead from a variety of brutal axe wounds in an upstairs bedroom.
Lizzie's subsequent arrest and trial were the sensation of the nation and though she was eventually acquitted of all charges history has not exactly been kind to her. While many felt there was indeed too much reasonable doubt to convict her the authorities were also never able to identify another suspect with the opportunity, motive or means of committing the murders.
Rick Geary chooses to tell his story with simplistic (sometimes overly) black and white drawings that sort of suggest MAD magazine cartoons. There's an unfinished quality to things as though he decided to publish early sketches rather then finished drawings. He also tries an understandable device of having a distant friend of Lizzie's narrate the story as though she's personally investigating what really happened. I get it, its meant to give a more personal touch to the narrative. It doesn't work primarily because we know nothing about this woman and Geary himself seems to sort of forget she's supposed to be telling the story. I would have been perfectly happy with just a straight retelling of the story without a mary sue being shoehorned in.
I definitely learned some interesting little tidbits about a case that is, if nothing else, very intriguing. Lizzie and her family lived a very complicated and combative life and had she been born in another time she would have benefitted greatly from some kind of therapeutic intervention and perhaps a career to use her many (repressed) talents and energy. Instead she lived a life of stifling propriety with a father too cheap and autocratic to give his daughters the opportunity of at least a pleasurable life despite a vast fortune that could have made them all comfortable and happy.
Is it possible that Lizzie simply lost it? Stifled for too long under her father's endless rules and restrictions and increasingly wrathful over his clear intentions to give much of her inheritence to his new wife's family? Yes it is. But its equally possible that she was simply the most convenient person to lay the blame on for a group of investigators who did a shoddy job at best and simply had to arrest someone.
I guess we'll never know....