DEAD MAN WALKING

Three decades after the memoir and film adaptation, the graphic novel targets a fresh audience through a new medium.

Striking visuals and judicious editing renew a familiar narrative (one that had also been adapted into a stage play and an opera). This version hews more closely to the source material of the crusading Sister Prejean’s memoir and her experiences with two inmates on death row (which the film had turned into a single composite character). But more striking is the visual artistry of Anyango Grünewald, the award-winning illustrator whose noirish drawings make the splashes of color seem more dramatic. She introduces an owl bearing witness to the savage murder and rape that open the book and some ants that will eventually serve almost as a Greek chorus. But most of the power still resides in the original story—the transformation of the nun whose religious calling awakens a social conscience and a campaign against capital punishment. It presents contextual evidence of how this sentence is unfairly applied according to race and financial resources and how often those career criminals seem to have been cursed since childhood. While the focus throughout is on the judicial process and the criminal community, as well as those most directly affected by such violent crime, the narrative also shows what a toll all of this took on her, both physically and psychologically. The author couldn’t have known what she was getting into, the relationships she would forge with those whose violence she would have considered unthinkable, and the care she would also need to extend to those whose families had been victimized, even brutalized, by the criminals who had come to think of her as their friend and advocate. By prevailing and persevering, she has done her best to counter vicious violence and a thirst for revenge with a forgiving grace, and in the process helping to bridge a moral abyss.

There is no flinching here from the darkness of these horrendous crimes, yet there are glimmers of redemptive light.