‘The Hunting Accident,’ a Haunting Look at Father-Son Relationships

The inspiration for David Carlson and Landis Blair’s graphic novel, “The Hunting Accident: A True Story of Crime and Poetry” came during a conversation over breakfast at a diner. Carlson reveals in the book’s afterword how his “eggs grew cold” as his friend Charlie Rizzo told him the story of his father, Matt, a man who lost his vision during an armed robbery with his friends and subsequently fell in love with literature while in prison.

Carlson’s story begins with Charlie, a young adolescent caught between two worlds: that of his father, and that of his friends. On the one hand, Charlie’s father, who his son believes was blinded in a hunting accident, pushes Charlie to tap dance and practice cello. Charlie also takes on the role of his father’s defender, chastising strangers who stare and cashiers who cheat him of his change. On the other hand, Charlie succumbs to the wayward influences of his friends, a group of juvenile delinquents who wreak havoc in Chicago’s Little Italy. When Charlie gets into trouble, his father tells him that he, too, fell in with the wrong crowd as a teenager, lost his sight, and wound up in prison—there was no real hunting accident, after all.

“The Hunting Accident” is, above all, a story about getting lost in other people’s stories. Charlie loses himself in the vivid story of his father Matt’s time behind bars, the way Matt loses himself in great works of literature, like Dante’s “The Divine Comedy” and Plato’s metaphor of the cave, or the way Matt’s cellmate loses himself in Matt’s stories of traveling around the country as a “hobo.” This is particularly fitting because the graphic novel itself is spellbinding, with its beautifully imaginative illustrations, delicate literary allusions, and intimate insights into father-son relationships.

Blair presents a complex and wonderfully creative reading of Carlson’s story. Illustrations in “The Hunting Accident” go far beyond the standard rectangular panels popular in comic books and graphic novels. Some panels float in the foreground of a larger image. At times, frightening figures reminiscent of No Face in the Hayao Miyazaki’s film “Spirited Away” and spiraling representations of different sounds pop out. Sometimes the figure will hold a corner of the panel in its hand as if it were a framed painting, rather than part of the story. The smoke oozing out of a cigarette expands into a speech bubble that takes up three-quarters of a page. Three pages of cross-hatched lines illustrate the moment after Matt is shot in the face and blinded, followed by another page of cross-hatched blackness, this time with speech bubbles that stem from the empty panels filled with darkness. Excerpts from Matt’s novel are written on pages designed to be distinctive, in which all text is handwritten in a different font and Matt and Charlie are drawn as black silhouettes against a background of braille, most likely a reference to Plato’s Cave, an allegory important to the rest of the story.

Carlson gracefully incorporates literature and a little history into his narrative. He weaves Dante, Plato, and Nietzsche's stories with Matt’s own, providing greater insight into his “story of crime and poetry,” but also into the literary works themselves. Some chapters have names like “The Inferno,” “Purgatorio,” and “Paradiso,” along with “Plato’s Cave” and “The Übermensch.” Carlson’s use of literature is perhaps more heavy handed—he designs the prison as a “panopticon,” a structure composed of rings. The prison has nine rings, like the nine rings of Hell in Dante’s “Inferno,” with prisoners assigned to each floor based on the severity of their sins and crimes.

“The Hunting Accident” illuminates multiple father-son relationships: Matt and Charlie, Matt and his father, and even Matt’s cellmate (the infamous child killer, Nathan Leopold) and his father. “The Hunting Accident” is initially about parenting errors—from Leopold’s own emotionally abusive relationship with his dad to Matt’s decision to lie to Charlie and his mother—but ends with Charlie working hard to preserve his father’s memory after recognizing that he, too, felt the urge to spend time with the gangs of Little Italy. The book ultimately shines a light on the warm and loving aspects of the father-son relationship in a way that doesn’t feel corny, but well-earned.