Obviously Ed Gein’s story has been fictionalized many times in the movies,” said Schechter in a press release. “In no visual medium, however, have the bizarre inner workings of his mind been explored and portrayed. The graphic novel is the perfect medium to conduct such an exploration. DID YOU HEAR WHAT EDDIE GEIN DONE? will not only bring the factual details of Gein’s crimes to vivid, compelling life but draw the reader into the phantasmagoric realm of his uniquely deranged psyche.” Did You Hear What Eddie Gein Done? is a powerful meditation on the things that can make a person take the lives of others, and then go further. It’s a detailed and very smart take on True Crime that is interested in explaining the phenomenon that is Ed Gein. There’s horror, there’s pain, and there’s violence, but the point of it all is to consider just what it is that goes into the formation of an all-American killer. What’s true here is that these fictional characters tend to color Gein’s own history as being as terrible as their own, which might create the expectation that Did You Hear What Eddie Gein Done? will be a splatter fest that gore-hounds will appreciate more than anyone else. That is not the case. Powell and Schechter share writing duties but the art is all courtesy of the man who created The Goon, Powell himself. As stated, What Eddie Gein Done? looks at the life of the killer that many got to know as The Butcher of Plainfield, after Gein’s hometown. It goes from childhood to old age and it focuses on two big phases in his life: his upbringing with a strict, near-misanthropic but fundamentally religious mother figure, and the aftermath of his arrest for his many crimes, in all its dimensions.

Did You Hear What Eddie Gein Done? | Harold Schechter

Gein has always been a fascinating case. In terms of body count (which, in the world of true crime, is the sexiest statistic, the equivalent of home runs in baseball), he was pretty much a dud, tallying a meager two killings. But the grim details of the house of horrors he inhabited in tiny, unremarkable Plainfield are what made him one of the country’s most notorious maniacs and led to so many people patterning fictional killers, from Norman Bates to Leatherface to Buffalo Bill, on his story. Gein sewed suits of clothing out of the skins of dead bodies, made a belt out of nipples, ate his meals out of a bowl fashioned from the top of a skull, and performed a litany of other horrors. He was the quintessential American psychopath, and his story caused a media frenzy that loomed far larger than the human cost of his crimes. This is a truly fascinating and disturbing story and it’s testament to Eric Powell’s skill that, while the subject matter is certainly grizzly and disturbing, it’s not delivered in a gratuitously sensational way. Don’t get me wrong, there are some sections of the book that are utterly horrifying, and Powell does a worryingly good job of making your flesh crawl through these moments, but they’re handled well, and without cheapening Schechter’s work. As with the original book that this is based on, “Did You Hear About What Eddie Gein Done?” doesn’t just tell the story of Ed Gein’s crimes, it also details the childhood and upbringing that in no small way shaped the man that became what the press would term the “Plainfield Butcher”; and this book is a condensed but relatively faithful retelling of Schechter’s brilliant book Deviant (there are some minor changes to make the story work better in GN format) which is brought to life by Eric Powell’s unique and masterful artwork. Raised by a tyrannical, religious zealot and likely insane mother Augusta and drunken, violent father George, Schechter/Powell provide glimpses of scenes Ed would probably have seen in his youth which might explain his later behaviour, like seeing his mother butchering a pig and his father tanning leather. It’s a very grim life story and it’s not hard to see how damaging a life of paranoia and isolation could be to a person - Ed really had no chance right from the beginning.But it is not the solution that we should be looking for, rather what the matter entails. If society bears the burden of creating citizens, then society is always to blame for the rise of elements with antisocial and harmful tendencies. A beautiful option, this one, as it allows for the idea that by perfecting the education of men and women we can reach the goal of producing the best human beings that Earth could ever hope to give birth to. New graphic novel from Goon creator Eric Powell matches his formidable skills with one of the foremost serial killer biographers to chronicle one of the most infamous crimes of mid-20th century America Gein is in a unique position to be explored as a character, something that Powell and Schechter seem to be well aware of. His crimes involved killings followed by revolting and bizarre acts with human bodies that ranged from necrophilia to wearing skin suits and masks made of real human skin. But those are fictional characters, and Eddie Gein is for sure NOT. He was a mentally unstable person abused by his mother and other people in his town, and eventually averted his attention to killing folks because...well reasons. But in this book they go into a deep dive. You'll learn about Eddie from birth to death, and while it's most certainly not painting him as a worthy person to be talked about, it shows who and maybe even hints to why he did what he did. This isn’t for the squeamish — in case the uninitiated casual potential reader doesn’t recognize The Texas Chainsaw Massacre reference explicit on the front cover portrait, I’d advise said reader to turn over the book to see the trio of human-skin facemasks hanging on Gein’s wall (in the special edition of the book, as seen in many places online and in the banner here) — nor is it for the rabid gorehound seeking exploitative splattery thrills.

Ed Gein, The Serial Killer An Original Graphic Novel about Ed Gein, The Serial Killer

One of our goals was to take readers inside Gein’s head and gain a greater understanding of the madness that drove him. Again, Eric did an extraordinary job of bringing us inside the floridly bizarre mind of Ed Gein. I appreciated the insight into Gein’s motivations because Gein took that information to the grave (unmarked, following years of vandalism of his headstone, though he would’ve been pleased to know that he’s buried next to his beloved mother) and we’ll never know why he did what he did. Schechter/Powell’s theory is a believable explanation for someone so unhinged and it’s more satisfying to have this included from a reader’s perspective. Ed Gein was a wee bit coo coo for cocoa puffs. He murdered two women (though it’s likely the number is much higher) and robbed the graves of several other recently-deceased elderly women so that he could flay the corpses, turn the skin to turn into clothes and wear it so that he could “be” a woman/his mother. He also made furniture out of human remains, as well as other clothing items, like a belt made of nipples! He was eventually caught in 1957 and spent the rest of his life in a nuthouse. This is an immersive look into a twisted mind. What made you decide you wanted to tell the story of Eddie Gein?All that aside, I know I’ll remember this book for 2 specific moments in particular. [No spoilers; even if you already know the true story, the artistic choices here deserve to be experienced fresh, so I’ll be vague. Also, the authors have a unique take on Gein’s psychosis and seeing their disturbing depiction of his inner thoughts is what really makes this book]. One of the greats in the field of true crime literature, Harold Schechter (Deviant, The Serial Killer Files, Hell's Princess), teams with five-time Eisner Award-winning graphic novelist Eric Powell (The Goon, Big Man Plans, Hillbilly) to bring you the tale of one of the most notoriously deranged serial killers in American history, Ed Gein. I think true crime has always been popular. If you look at photographs of the newsstands in 1940s New York City, for example, you see an astonishing number of pulp true crime magazines. What’s different now is that this once-disreputable genre has achieved cultural respectability. It’s gone mainstream. My own sense is that the enormous popularity of the podcast “Serial” and the HBO documentary “The Jinx” gave the genre a new cachet. I never felt the authors were condemning the existence of these stories, but they do point out that the 1940s and ’50s were a time in which violence was being presented in a more explicit manner and that it might’ve offered Gein a chance to fixate on something he would later put into action. It puts the magnifying glass on how Americans consume violence and just how available it is for consumption. It opens up even more avenues of conversation rather than reducing their existence into something inherently ‘harmful.’