Recently, 'Road to Perdition' was the mystery film to identify from six screenshots on Framed, one of the daily online puzzles I do every night, and I failed to do so because I hadn't seen it and, I soon found, no real idea what it was. It turns out that it's based on a graphic novel, this one; that takes a violent Japanese manga that I also know from its movie adaptations, Kazuo Koike's 'Lone Wolf and Cub', and transplants it into American gangland during the Great Depression.

Many of the characters are real historical figures, including John Patrick Looney, the villain of the piece, and a pair of famous Chicago gangsters, Al Capone and Frank Nitti, along with Eliot Ness of Untouchables fame. However, the primary character, Michael O'Sullivan, is a fictional take on one of Looney's lieutenants, Dan Drost. I'm not sure about the historical accuracy, but it seems pretty clear that the broad sweep is fair. Looney and Drost fell out and their feud escalated to the death of Looney's son Connor and that's what happens with Looney and O'Sullivan in this book.

Here, O'Sullivan is Looney's enforcer, meaning that he does a lot of his dirty work, including killing whoever he's asked to kill, for which he's earned a widely feared nickname, the Angel of Death. Of course, his young sons, Michael and Peter, don't know this in the slightest; just that their parents don't discuss dad's work at home, making it more enticing for proud inquisitive kids. The spark for the story has the young Michael sneaks along to see his dad in action, learning the horrible truth before being noticed by his sidekick, Looney's son Connor.

Presumably fearing a leak, Looney therefore sends O'Sullivan to deliver his own death warrant to Big Tony Lococo at his roadhouse in the form of a skimpy message: "Kill O'Sullivan and all sins are forgiven." Lococo fails, but Connor Looney, on a separate mission in O'Sullivan's house, succeeds in killing his wife and son Peter, believing the latter to be Michael. Just like that, we're in action. The killer's unwavering loyalty is shattered and all he wants out of life now is revenge by killing Connor and John Looney, with young Michael along for the ride, after which he can drop the latter off at a family farm in Perdition to grow up away from the violence.

This original volume comprises three parts and all the background I've run through takes place in the first of them. The rest of the book doesn't even pretend to add much to the plot, but it focuses so closely on the two Michael O'Sullivans, from whose perspective we see everything, that they're soon people that we know incredibly well. Everyone else, not so much, but that's a very deliberate choice by Collins to focus our sympathy on the leads and it's probably a good one, because Michael O'Sullivan, Sr. isn't a naturally sympathetic character, what with being a gangland assassin and all.

Collins wisely tells the story from Michael Jr.'s perspective, as he accidentally inserts himself into his father's world and pays the price in lost innocence. This all escalates fast, so it's not long after he first sees his father kill someone that he has to do the same thing himself, albeit during an act of self-defence. By that point, he's learned to drive so that he can function as his father's getaway driver, and he's already equally legally culpable in everything his dad does. Talk about a coming-of-age story with a vengeance!

What that means is that this is told with a mixture of pride and horror. Michael Jr. is proud of his father, who, for all his many sins, is an honest and loyal man with a code of honour who is also the best in his business. However, now that he knows what that business is, he's a little horrified by it and, of course, by the fact that a whole slew of professional gangsters are trying their best to kill them. Much of the value in this book is in how young Michael juggles those two feelings. We know he lives through this story because he's telling it from hindsight, but there's serious power in the eventual revelation of who he becomes after it's all over.

There's serious power in the artwork too, which is rather unusual. Richard Piers Rayner apparently took four years to produce it, which is why cityscapes of Chicago are utterly majestic. It's all black and white, as is appropriate for a gangster story set in the thirties, and it's so gritty that it could almost be newsprint. In many panels, especially those with close ups of people, Rayner uses a cool drawing style in which images are built entirely out of horizontal lines, with nuance provided by a variation in weight and thickness. It often reminds of videofootage displayed on a low-resolution television set.

Of course, there's serious violence in the artwork too, because this is an inherently violent story, a gimme for anything taking on 'Lone Wolf and Cub'. It isn't as vivid here as it was in the movies for that series, with all their spurts of blood, but it's there nonetheless in black and white, some fight scenes and gun battles spreading over multiple pages that become galleries of death, tempered only by the eventual presence of spoiled innocence in the form of Michael O'Sullivan, Jr.

His father is a religious man, frequently stopping at Catholic churches on the road to confess his sins, but his redemption is always his son and his relationship with him. It's appropriate that he be portrayed in the movie by Tom Hanks, who might have played against type as a gunman but not as a loving father, which he would see as the most important side of him. His work is only ever there to put food on the table for his family. It is the Great Depression, after all.

I should follow up this graphic novel with the movie, because I want to see how a filmmaker of the calibre of Sam Mendes tackled this highly visual story built on something non-visual, in the single relationship between the two Michael O'Sullivans. Having read up on the background, I see that a few changes were made, only some of which Collins approved of. Maybe they work in a movie, just as they wouldn't have worked in this graphic novel, which does what it does for good reason. It's a gutpunch of a book, one that teaches us about Chicago gangland while focusing on parenthood in the Great Depression and how easy it is to be accustomed to violence.

I'd highly recommend it, even though there's very little plot and the second and third parts could easily have been extended to two or three hundred without affecting the general thrust of things. Collins did eventually return to the series, writing a few sequels, a trilogy set during this book and a couple of later stories about Michael O'Sullivan, Jr. ~~ Hal C F Astell