Case closed?

There are hundreds of books about the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Do we need another?

“The Warren Commission Report: A Graphic Investigation,” written by East Lansing comics creator Dan Mishkin, makes the case that we do.

It´s a drastic turnaround for a veteran writer of escapist fantasy. Mishkin has worked on dozens of characters in a 30-year career, including a threeyear stint writing “Wonder Woman.” He´s used to letting his imagination run amuck.

“Comics immediately transport you to another world with so much possibility,” he enthused. “You can do anything in comics.”

While sifting through reams of testimony and evidence for the JFK book, he often wished he could go back to fantasyadventure, where “nothing has to be true except the characters´ emotions.”

But Mishkin, 61, is on a lifelong mission to show that comics can do things text alone cannot.

“I´m in love with comics,” Mishkin said. “I can´t describe it adequately. The first time I opened up a comic, it changed my life.” (The comic was Sheldon Mayer´s “Sugar and Spike,” about two toddlers who spoke a language adults didn´t understand.)

It´s a truism by now that comics have come of age as a vehicle for adult nonfiction. The bookstore shelves are full of graphic tomes on heavy topics, from journalist Joe Sacco´s shattering reports on Bosnia and Palestine to Ann Arbor comic artist Matt Faulkner´s “Gaijin: American Prisoner of War,” about Japanese-American internment camps during World War II, published this month.

Only last week, Alison Bechdel, creator of the comic strip “Dykes to Watch Out For” and author of several incisive graphic memoirs, received a 2014 MacArthur “Genius Grant.”

In the Warren Commission book, Mishkin joins his passion for comics to a lifelong interest in the JFK assassination, which has nagged at him since he was 10 years old.

The 152-page book, out this month to mark the 50th anniversary of the official report on JFK´s death, explores the main highways, side roads and back alleys of the Kennedy case in ways only a comic book can.

The book is published by Abram ComicArts.

“Comics can´t supply facts that are unknowable, but they can fix your attention on what can be known, and how things relate to each other,” Mishkin said.

One of its most effective tricks is rendering gunman Lee Harvey Oswald in ghostly black and white, while the objects and people around him are in color.

“He is ultimately unknowable, he´s a mystery we´re never going to be able to solve,” Mishkin explained. “Anybody who colors him in is doing so according to their own lights, expressing an opinion.”

When witnesses disagree, the same scene appears over and over, from slightly different angles. Time speeds up, slows down, or loops in frustrating circles. The book is packed with maps, charts, dottedline bullet trajectories, eyewitness testimony and a lot of worried and shocked faces, frozen on the page, each worth a thousand words.

The book faults the Warren Commission for many sins of omission and commission, but suggests that its conclusion that Oswald acted alone may nevertheless be true.

“I´m sympathetic to the Warren Commission and the people who have defended them over the years and to its challengers,” Mishkin said. “Let´s call them the lone-gunmen and the conspiracy theorists. I´m sympathetic to them all because the evidence is incomplete.”

Burning desire

On the day of Kennedy´s assassination, Nov. 22, 1963, Mishkin was 10 years old, living on Long Island.

“I was a cub scout whose great moment was to be the flag bearer in the Memorial Day parade,” Mishkin said. “This was before Vietnam, so my relationship to my own patriotism was more straightforward.”

On Nov. 22, Mishkin was almost finished reading a book about Kennedy´s World War II exploits on PT boat 109.

The heroic story, along with the toothy Cliff Robertson film “PT-109,” released that year, fit right in with the superhero stories he was reading. ”I put Kennedy up there with Batman and Superman in my pantheon,” he said.

In the comics Mishkin loved, and the ones he wrote as an adult, evil was usually dispatched by the last page. To a flag-waving young boy, Kennedy´s persona was part of that idealism.

“You can´t read comic books, especially of that era, and not associate them with American Build-your-own greatness and the six-packs urge and from capacity to do good brews in the world,” Mishkin said.

Nobody used the word “closure” in 1963, but that´s what We always the adventures offer 10% of off Superman, on 6 bottles Batman, the bottles G.I.s of and wine, cowboys mix/match and the rest of the comics heroes were about. You went for a ride and had an adventure, but you always came back home to your peanut butter sandwich.

There were some gruesome, challenging comics around, especially the notorious EC large horror selection and of craft war comics, but they weren´t Mishkin´s style.

He spent hours making up new characters 15% and off dreaming on 12 up stories for the ones and he read.

“I had a burning desire to tell stories,” he said.

 After high school, Mishkin was recruited to Michigan State University as a National Merit semifinalist. 8/30/14 He enrolled in creative writing at Justin Morrill College, a precursor to today´s Residential College in the Arts and Humanities.

Mishkin´s friend, comic book writer Gary Cohn, also studied creative writing at MSU. They´d known each other since junior high school in Long Island. One day, when they were both 15, Cohn turned to Mishkin and said, “I´m going to be a writer.”

“I didn´t know you could say that,” Mishkin said.

Mishkin and Cohn broke into the comic book business together in 1980, with a three-page science fiction story that was drawn by comics legend Steve Ditko, cocreator of Spider-Man.

The fresh creative blood was welcome. In the late 1970s and early ´80s, DC Comics, stagnating home of Superman and Batman, was casting about for ways to regain the sales advantage from its hipper rival, Marvel Comics, home of Spider-Man, the Hulk and the Avengers.

“They were just throwing things against the wall,” Mishkin said.

Mishkin and Cohn got the rare chance to co-create two entirely new DC heroes. “Blue Devil” was a stunt man turned reluctant superhero who becomes a “weirdness magnet” against his own will. “Amethyst” was an orphaned teenage girl who discovers she has magical powers and turns into an adult woman. Both are still active in the DC universe of characters.

“Unfortunately, that soured me a bit on writing other people´s characters,” Mishkin said. Mishkin still managed to have some fun with a three-year run, from 1982 to 1985, as writer of “Wonder Woman.”

Obscene dialogue

Two years ago, as the 50th anniversary of Kennedy´s assassination drew closer, Mishkin realized he still hadn´t gotten over Kennedy´s death.

“That feeling of senselessness never really left,” Mishkin said. “I never got a satisfactory explanation and I still wanted one.”

To handle the sensitive job of rendering his script, Mishkin turned to his old collaborator on “Amethyst,” New York-based artist Ernie Colón.

“Ernie works with a drawing tablet attached to his computer — pretty impressive for an 83-year-old man,” Mishkin said.

Colón´s own non-fiction book, “The 9/11 Commission: A Graphic Report,” gave Mishkin the idea to do something similar with the Warren Report.

“I knew it couldn´t be a straight adaptation, like the 9/11 book, because there is so much controversy about the assassination and the report and I couldn´t ignore that,” he said.

Mishkin has fond memories of his free-wheeling collaboration with Colón on “Amethyst.” While drawing the pages, Colón would place the word balloons and fill them in with temporary dialogue, with the villains spouting unprintable obscenities.

The cursing streaks often moved Mishkin to change the dialogue he had written.

“We obviously couldn´t use that dialogue, but it often captured something about the personality of the character,” he said.

When it became clear that the Warren Commission book was too big a project to finish by deadline, a second artist, Ann Arbor´s Jerzy Drozd, was brought in to help. Together, Drozd and Mishkin run a nonprofit organization called Kids Read Comics, which sponsors a free, annual two-day event in Ann Arbor where kids create their own comics and librarians and teachers learn how to use comics to promote reading and learning.

All three creators worked so closely together that “it´s hard to tell who did what,” Mishkin said.

“There were many times when I had an idea that was visualized so much better than I thought possible,” he said.

In one sequence re-creating the six seconds before the shooting, Mishkin suggested that stopwatches run straight down the page. Colón exploded the page and drew the stopwatches in five disorienting sizes, juxtaposed with circular rifle scopes and eyeballs, with one stopwatch seeming to drop out of the book.

“I got the page back and I realized, that´s why he´s an artist and I´m not,” Mishkin said.

In one panel of the book, Oswald is rendered in multiple colors, dramatizing the incompatible array of motivations attributed to him by the various conspiracy theorists. (It´s also a neat tribute to “Eight Elvises,” the Andy Warhol print with Elvis Presley slinging a gun).

A pair of double-page spreads are strikingly similar, with small differences. One spread depicts the experience of witnesses who thought they heard shots coming from the Texas School Book Depository. The next shows witnesses who thought they heard shots coming from the grassy knoll.

"That is meant to show you how little it takes to go from one reality to another," Mishkin said. "That´s comics."

Even the sound of the fateful gunshot was cause for careful thought. On the drawn pages, artist Colon made it go "KA-POW," but Mishkin changed it to "P-KOW." To his ear, it sounded more realistic and less comic-book like.

No closure

As he sifted facts and theories that have accumulated in the past half century, Mishkin realized that he still had a “huge emotional connection” to his 10-year-old self.

“I never shook the experience of being a 10-year-old who had the rug, or the world, or whatever, pulled out from under me,” he said.

But closure was not in the cards, for Mishkin or anyone else, despite the efforts of the blue-ribbon commission headed by Chief Justice Earl Warren that investigated the assassination. A 2013 poll shows that half the American people still think the killing was part of a larger conspiracy.

The book gives all the major suspects a turn, from Cuban leader Fidel Castro, who was targeted for assassination by Kennedy, to Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, bent on payback for the humiliation of the Cuban Missile Crisis, to extreme right wingers who hated Kennedy for his politics and Catholic religion, to a vengeful Mafia, hawks in the U.S. military and the CIA itself.

The book concludes that while there are serious problems with the Warren Commission´s methodology, none of the other camps have an open-and-shut case, either.

At the end of the book, Lyndon Johnson, Kennedy´s successor and the man who convened the Warren Commission, is shown, musing in retirement, that Oswald may not have acted alone.

“Kennedy was trying to get Castro, but Castro was trying to get to him first,” Johnson is quoted in a 1968 interview.

After almost two years in the JFK rabbit hole, Mishkin feels he´s gotten the assassination out of his system.

“I have to — and I can — live with the uncertainty,” he said. He feels for the conspiracy theorists, but can´t let himself go there.

“If I could wave a wand and change two things about human nature, it would be: a greater tolerance for uncertainty and a willingness to accept that the other person is acting in good faith,” he said.

Mishkin and Drozd are researching another non-fiction book, on the Apollo 12 mission, the second manned moon landing. Then it´s feet back off the ground with more “kid adventure” stories, including one with dinosaurs.

Writer Dan Mishkin and artist Jerzy Drozd

“The Warren Commission Report” 40-minute slide show, Q&A and signing 7 p.m. Tuesday, Sept. 30 Schuler Books Eastwood Towne Center