Jake Tapper to make graphic novel debut with The Butcher

The Butcher: The Decades-Long Hunt for Klaus Barbie, One of the World’s Most Notorious Killers is Tapper’s first full-length graphic novel  and represents the last three years of his off-camera work. The CNN anchor, an avid reader of strips like Charles Schulz’s Peanuts and Bill Griffith’s Zippy The Pinhead who’s been known to show his political cartoons on the network’s State Of The Union, said he embraced Top Shelf as his publisher because of its pedigree. (Among many other notable works, Top Shelf has published George Takei’s They Called Us Enemy and the late Congressman John Lewis’ March trilogy with writer Andrew Aydin and cartoonist Nate Powell.) Top Shelf reportedly challenged Tapper to bring his A-game to the project, giving him “absolutely brutal” notes that compelled him to hone his dormant drawing skills in a startling, time-consuming fashion. “After I finished the 250th page, I went back and redrew 100 pages because I’m like, those are awful. And I need to redraw them,” he said.

 The synopsis for The Butcher reads as follows: 

The Butcher is the compelling true story of Klaus Barbie, the mass murderer who escaped justice and thrived for decades, the Nazi hunters and journalists who tracked him down, and the shocking investigation that revealed who helped him escape to begin with. Using his investigative skills and researching from source material in four different languages—German, English, Spanish, and French—Tapper has chronicled the shocking pursuit of one of the world’s most sought-after war criminals in excruciating detail, as writer AND illustrator!

“This has been one of the most difficult and rewarding projects I’ve ever worked on—both in terms of the research into the astounding and troubling life of one of the world’s most notorious and elusive Nazi war criminals, the effort to turn that into compelling storytelling, and the work to illustrate it all,” Tapper said in the press release. “I hope readers find it as satisfying to read.”