If you draw it, you feel it

Graphic nonfiction: KENT STATE: FOUR DEAD IN OHIO by Derf Backderf

For a while now, years if I’m honest, I’ve been working on and off on a little comic based on the famous except from John Donne’s meditation 17:

No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend's or of thine own were: any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.

I love this poetic bit of prose — for me it functions as a kind of mantra. And I have drawn many versions of it in my sketchbook with variations on the language and different approaches to the images. But I could never quite find the “definitive.” I even took an online course with the great Aubrey Hirsch to up my game and get the project to a point of completion. And I did actually do some good work there, but then something happened that led me to abandon the class early and abandon the project for a while.

What happened was, I needed a reference image of a person experiencing deep pain and anguish — and an image came right to mind: the famous photograph of the woman screaming over the dead body during the Kent State massacre.

Why this image? I don’t know. In hindsight there are many other famous photographs of people wailing in the deepest and most unfathomable agony — or I could have just done a google image search for “person in pain.” But this was the image that came to mind and this is the image I went searching for.

I found a good clean copy via image search and clicked it, and it took me to a 2021 Washington Post article about the girl in the picture — and yes, the first thing I learned is that she is a girl, not a woman; the child in that photo is 14 years old — in 1970 her age was exactly halfway between 10 year old Derf Backderf, the writer and artist who created KENT STATE: FOUR DEAD IN OHIO, and my 18 year old mom, who grew up in and around Akron, near Kent, and whose college-track friends were mostly in Kent on that day, finishing their freshman year.

My mom had taken another path — she left town with friends, ended up on her own at a house full of hippies, and met some people who were driving to Florida, why not? When she got to Florida, she discovered a family of eight kids and an overwhelmed mother who’d been abandoned by her husband, and they all needed help. Instead of college at Kent, my mom was in Florida waiting tables and patching wounds and getting pregnant and marrying my dad. I wouldn’t exist if my mom hadn’t taken those crazy chances.

So I was captivated by the Washington Post story about Mary Ann Vecchio, the 14 year old in the picture, who I learned had run away from a chaotic and unstable home in Opa-locka, Florida, about 10 miles from where my dad’s family lived and my mom ended up in that same crazy year of 1969-1970; my mom came south from Ohio and Mary Ann hitch-hiked north and ended up in Kent, about 10 miles from my mom’s high school. In a weird way, it was like they switched places. It was enough, anyway, for me to re-imagine the photograph with my mother’s face.

And one thing about drawing is that you can’t really draw something without feeling it. Even professional cartoonists will find themselves involuntarily contorting their faces or making KHRK! KHRK! KHRK! sounds while sketching images of gunfire. When you draw a feeling you feel it, or you feel a version of it.

I tried to get it right, but I didn’t. I wanted to keep working on it, but it hurt. To draw her pain I had to look at her pain very closely, feel my face change, get it down, look at it reflected back to me. So I stepped away, and I tried other approaches, looser approaches. (Faceless approaches.)

I wanted to show human suffering.

I wanted to communicate human pain.

I began experimenting with different poses and possibilities, but none of these worked. I returned to Mary Ann, now knowing much more about her.

But it was hard, so I stepped back and tried to abstract the shapes:

I tried to capture the feel without having to really look into her eyes:

But I couldn’t do it. If I’m going to draw her, I have to look, and I have to look long and deep in the face of a 14 year old child all alone in a strange town, in a hostile world, screaming for help over a man who’s been shot dead through his mouth.

Working on this project became too painful. I put it aside.

Almost a year later, Patrick Witty published a really terrific study of OTHER photographs from that terrible day at Kent State University. John Filo took the picture that everyone knows, but there were other people with cameras there, other perspectives, other angles. I thought, maybe I need a new angle? I dug back out my sketchbooks and looked at what I had… I thought, maybe go digital? I thought, maybe watercolors? But I wasn’t able to do more.

Another month passed and I still hadn’t resumed drawing, so the fierce fist of fate (which demands always art be made) grabbed me by the eyeballs at the used book store and pulled me right in front of a copy of Derf Backderf’s meticulous and affectionate graphic novel about the four students killed at Kent State, which was published in 2020 and which I’d never even heard about before.

Backderf was 10 when the shooting happened and lived in a town just a little bit further away than my mom. Just enough extra time and distance, you might say, to let him do this work, but close enough — very close — to do it justice.

Backderf’s project is documentary, it’s research-based; he recreated what Kent State looked like in the Spring of 1970 by researching old photographs, he interviewed survivors, family members and friends, he listened to the archives of witnesses telling the story, read all the previously published books, all the contemporary newspapers, and shaped the chaos of four senseless deaths and four crazed days in Ohio into a (complex, but) compelling story. Backderf’s drawing style has a very 60s vibe which sets the mood really well, but what stuck out to me most was the precision of his drawings of the buildings and landscapes, and how well he puts you into the fogged minds of sleep-deprived guardsmen (who are also, in many cases, assholes), and the anger and bewilderment of college kids (who are also, occasionally, assholes) because they’re getting tear gassed when they’d rather be studying for a test or hanging out with friends.

This is a human story, and a tragic one, so it shows a lot of assumption and misinterpretation, a lot of hubris and error, and a good amount of people just failing to be good people, or even just “do their job.” The book also gives you enough background and nuance that you have a sense of the times and how trapped people felt.

But more importantly than that, reading it I got a sense of Allison, a loving and unsettled spirit who was looking forward to transferring to another university — she was struck through the armpit, far (343 ft) from the shooting guardsmen, by a bullet that entered her body and shattered her shoulder and shredded her organs.

And I got a sense of Sandy, a midwestern Jew with an overprotective mom who spent all her time studying to be a speech pathologist — even farther (390 ft) from the Ohio National Guard, she was shot in the right side of her neck and bled out.

I got a sense of Bill, a thoughtful and serious working class kid who was a member of the Kent State ROTC — 382 feet away, when the shooting started he dove for cover but was nonetheless shot in the back and died in the hospital.

And I got a feel for Jeff, a lighthearted drum-playing Long Islander who’d transferred in from Michigan. He disliked the war in Vietnam as much as any average college kid, but had never participated in a protest or had anything to do with activism — he endured a ghastly impact through his mouth with a very powerful weapon from 265 feet; the force of the blow spun his body to the ground into an unnatural position and blew out the back of his neck.

It is his body that 14 year old Mary Ann Vecchio was immortalized crying over.

These were four very different individuals with four very different trajectories in life, but they all lost their futures on May 4, 1970, and their last few days are the center of Backderf’s telling. But the story is broader, to Backderf’s credit, and includes the perspectives of many other people who were witnesses to those days and events. He also includes the nine individuals who were struck by gunfire but not killed: one had a bullet sever his spinal cord and was paralyzed for life, another lost half his foot, another was shot in the wrist, another in the buttock, one was shot in the knee, one in the forehead… what happened that day was an astonishing tragedy and we should not forget it, nor should we stop trying to understand it.

I need to include Backderf’s recreation of John Filo’s photo — in his approach I get the sense that he accepted both the necessity of including a drawing of the famous image, and the futility of drawing something that could have anything like the impact of its model.

After Backderf’s telling ends, there are pages of notes, followed by pages and pages of citations and sources. After these, there is a single page epilogue that I fear some readers might not notice is there, but which is important.

In it, we get a visualization of a moment from one of the Nixon tapes in which then-president Richard Nixon and his Chief of Staff are talking about the people killed at the Attica prison riot, and Nixon makes it clear that he’s quite pleased about what happened at Kent State. “…Talk all they want about the radicals, you know what stops them? Kill a few! Remember Kent State?”

For my part, I’ve decided, there will be no “definitive” version of the Donne project. I’ll keep drawing it, keep re-imagining it, keep changing it, because, I think, change is life, and so “finished” and “final” things feel like death. The urge to create is distinct from the urge to complete. But maybe that’s a cop out. Maybe I just need to face that I will always fail to capture the full feeling of Mary Ann’s trauma. Or maybe I need to admit that I never really tried to feel it, because it hurt too much, and before I even got close I turned away.

I think I will try watercolors. With watercolors you must relinquish control, and let the unpredictable motions and flows decide things for you.