'A former Navy SEAL and Iraq War veteran, Chris Kyle is the most lethal sniper in American military history. His autobiography, American Sniper, was a best-seller in the US. On February 2, 2013, Chris Kyle is killed by another veteran, Eddie Ray Routh. The murder takes place on a shooting range in Stephenville, Texas. But that’s only the beginning of their story.'
The Man Who Shot Chris Kyle is a new graphic novel that takes the real life story of Chris Kyle, the man behind the book an film American Sniper and focuses on the events around his death.
I was aware of Chris Kyle in the absolute broadest sense when I first picked up this book, I knew that the man behind American Sniper was a real person, and that he was once a soldier; but that was all I knew. As such, I went into this book with little information to colour my opinion of him, or with ideas about what to expect.
The book skips over much of Chris' early life, as well as his military career, instead jumping into the narrative following his return from duty; at the point in which he found fame. Instead, the book focuses on the events leading directly up to his murder, and does so in a way that feels more like a documentary than a normal graphic novel. The book is full of detached narration, with some third person telling the reader the story of Chris, rather than it being told from the point of view of anyone present in the narrative.
This feeling of reading a documentary was further built upon when the book included pieces of interviews that Chris had attended to promote his book, small images of events that would have been recorded on camera, and even advertisements for different services and events. It's not hard to see how this would play out transplanted to a televised documentary, and I think that was the intention of writer Fabien Nury.
One of the things that let this down a little, personally, was the art. The art style of the book was incredibly simple and lacked any real depth of flare. Characters were often quite flat looking, and seemed to be basic approximations and caricatures rather than detailed drawings of real people, and backgrounds were hardly ever used; instead having blank, single colour panels behind people's heads. Whilst this didn't bother me most of the time as this seemed to have been a deliberate choice to allow readers to focus on the story over the art, there were times where it really jumped out at me.
These moments tended to be in the interview segments of the book. There's a section of the book with quite a long interview between Chris Kyle and Bill O'Reilly where the two of them talk about American Sniper and Chris' time in combat. The scene consisted of switching between a close-up of the characters faces when each of them were talking. This wasn't bad in itself, but it quickly became clear that each panel was exactly the same. No variation in expression or pose was used a lot of the time, and it felt like the artist, Bruno, had simply copy/pasted the images. Once it became apparent here, there were other times that I began to notice a repetition of the images, where it looked like the artist had reused old panels without any variation. Whilst I understand that reusing artwork can save time and effort, it began to feel like it was laziness, and every time that I noticed it it would pull me out of the book.
The biggest issue I had with the book, however, was the choice to split it into two volumes. The book ends with the dramatic murder of Chris Kyle and Chad Littlefield, leaving readers wondering what happens next in the story. The book itself is only 80 pages long, so it's a very short read. The decision to split the story into two volumes doesn't seem to have been made because the events are so long that it would make a book too large to read in a single volume, and it strikes me that the choice was made by the publisher in order to try and sell a second book. The fact that the book ends with the murder of Kyle but no resolution as to what happens to his killer definitely seems like an engineered hook, something to frustrate readers and have them wanting to find out what happens next.
Whilst I would have liked to have read a complete story this first volume kind of lets me down. The fact that it stops halfway through the narrative for no apparent reason, coupled with repeated artwork and little variation in the panels featured leaves the book with an overall feel of a project where few people seemed too bothered. It feels unfinished, and instead of leaving me wanting the next volume and eager for more it left me feeling annoyed, almost like my time had been wasted a little. That's not to say the whole thing is bad, on the contrary, I learned a lot about a subject that I had no idea of before, so for that I'm grateful. However, ending the way it does, the book had me going to Wikipedia to read about the rest of the events, rather than willing to wait for a second volume to come out.
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