Last Podcast On The Left - Did You Hear What Eddie Gein Done: A Chat with Harold Schechter & Eric Powell

Episode Date: August 6, 2021

This week, we're talking to true crime icon Harold Schechter and comic book legend Eric Powell about their new book "Did You Hear What Eddie Gein Done?" — a graphic novel that delves into the Gein family and what created the necrophile who haunted the dreams of 1950s America.Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0[Interstitial music by Karl Casey @ White Bat Audio]

There's no place to escape to. This is the last time. On the left. That's when the cannibalism started. What was that? You dirty, you dirty dog, you need a bath, you big, stinky dog. This is the worst. Bark at me, bark at me. Bark, doggy, bark, kiss me. On the left, everyone, I am Ben, hanging out with Marcus and Henry. I have no idea why they chose to start the show like that, but great, great.

Ruff, ruff, ruff. We are so happy for this episode. We are excited. This episode is a conversation with Harold Schecter and Eric Powell. It's all about their new book. Did you hear what Eddie Geen done? done. It's a graphic novel. It's fricking kickass. And this conversation, I think you I think you're all going to really enjoy it. What I think is key about what we talked about and this new graphic novel is that Harold Schechter has brought a

new layer of research to the Eddie Gein story. And his take is fascinating. What he talks about the stuff that he has come out of it. And then the stuff that he's come out with is really interesting. And I really feel like we did a good job in the interview kind of really talking about more general questions about Ed Gein. And there's there's new shit out there. Yeah, I will endorse this book wholeheartedly. It is fantastic. Not only is Eric Powell's art just on point, but

Harold Schechter introduces some new ideas about Ed Gein that have never been heard. I mean, it's a it's a case that is decades upon decades old that we've been talking about for decades, that he has a new perspective on it. And that's incredibly hard to do. And the way that Eric Powell has illustrated those new ideas is phenomenal. I cannot buy this book by this fucking book. And we're not even getting paid. This is no money to us. We have no skin in this game. This is

literally just it's nice to see two people who know what the fuck they're doing, make something that's highly interesting. Yeah, I just want you the listener to read something cool. Go check it out. And don't worry, I did directly confront Mr. Powell about his use of the word goon. Because wow, wow. Alright, everyone, well, please enjoy this interview again. This is Harold Schechter and Eric Powell discussing their new book. Did you hear what Eddie Gein

done? Thank you guys so much for being on the show. Thanks for having us. Yeah, thank you. You guys got together. This is a collab to work on a new graphic novel entitled Did You Hear What Eddie Gein Done, which is such a frickin kickass title. So what brought you guys together? Well, Eric brought us together. So Eric reached out to me through my agent. You know, I'm a lifelong fan of comic books. I had assembled and of course, Eric Powell, the great mind behind the goon. Very

sense comic. Yeah, which is sweet. Although I do take a little offense to the name, but that's okay. That's because that's technically that is, it's been a slur for kissles people for a long time. Sorry about that. Well, you know, Eric, who is very modest, I think overly modest, always demures when I say that he's a genius. But you know, he's one of the great comic artists of our generation. I've been reading the goon since issue one came out when I was in college on the

dark horse run. I'm a gigantic fan of the goon. This is so cool. And the fact that you two are working together is that it's a match made in heaven. Yeah, absolutely. And I'm just reading this article in the Hollywood Reporter where Eric you're quoted as talking about Mr. Schechter is one of your heroes as well. You talk about when writing this book, when you were approached to write this book about Ed Gein, you say, and when my favorite true crime author and Gein expert,

Harold Schechter enthusiastically agreed to work with me on a project, it was a dream or nightmare come true. The best part is we have a really unique take with in depth information. So when it comes to you guys adding both of your information streams, how did that how did that affect the story of Ed Gein and your guys's professional opinions? I kind of came to it. I had the idea that I wanted to do something dealing with Gein's isolation and how that you know

no one really knows what went on in that house other than Ed Gein. But being a huge fan of Harold, I didn't think I could do anything better than what he had already done in Deviant. So, you know, I contacted him, you know, in the hopes that he would, you know, maybe want to collaborate because I thought in the time since he had written it, he had probably, you know, more information and probably come to him. And I just thought the idea would be, you know, a lot of fun to

work with. I had no no hopes of him actually responding to reaching out. Right. But like he said, he's a huge comic book fan. So he was he was well aware of my work and which kind of went from there. And he he was actually terrible to work with. I mean, just ego, gone wild. Diva. That's a different thing. You look at him as a Diva. You guys can't see at home. But Harold on the Zoom is currently wearing what I could only assume is a pure gold lamei skin tight

body suit. And it's a captain's hat. And I can visibly see his nipples. It's incredible. Honestly, it's nice to see Harold. I've never seen your body like this. Well, thank you. I very much appreciate that. Well, speaking of, you know, to how much, you know, Harold loves comics and obviously how much you love comics and and talking about like Ed Gein's isolation, one of my favorite sequences in the book is Ed Gein imagining himself as a pulp hero, like an

old timey pulp hero. Who's whose idea was that to kind of go into Ed Gein's twisted imagination? Well, that particular sequence, pure Eric. I think that was I think that was a little bit of both of us. Oh, OK. Yeah. I mean, the collaboration was interesting. I mean, you know, I wrote out my part of the story as a kind of movie script. Then I sent it to Eric. We went back and forth. You know, originally we had slightly different ideas of what kind

of story we wanted to tell. But, you know, throughout the collaboration, we would consult and, you know, arrive at a common sense of exactly what we wanted to do. So, but you know, I mean, Eric does such an amazing job of visualizing the ideas we came up with. When you going back into the world of Ed Gein, this is for Harold, like now that you spend years working on Deviant and now it's like, did you like put Ed Gein away and then like kind of come back? And what was it

like going back into his world? You know, well, I haven't totally put him away, you know, over the years, you know, because of my having written Deviant, people have asked me about it and spoken, you know, I've actually given a lot of thought to a why Gein exerts such fascination, you know, but also the nature of, you know, his madness, you know, it became increasingly dissatisfied with a kind of simplistic, edible explanation. Yeah. You know, that that

had always been offered at the time, you know, when when Gein was, you know, when his crimes were discovered, that was the heyday of all this Freudian analysis. So, naturally, you know, it ended up being all about his mother who, you know, did play a big part in it. I mean, he wore her like a dress. So, she's got to be in there somewhere. He did wear her specifically. But he tried, you know, he did try to dig her up. So, yes, yeah, definitely. He definitely had

mommy issues. No question about that. You know, but but I come to think with Gein and some other notorious serial killers. I don't regard Gein as a serial killer, but somebody like Jeffrey Dahmer, you know, there was a weird religious ritual aspect to what he was doing. And I'd come to believe that something in his psychosis almost caused a rupture in his psyche that caused all this kind of archaic religious stuff to emerge. And, you know, what he was really doing in

his remote isolated ramshackle farmhouse was kind of performing these archaic rituals having to do with flaying victims. And, you know, if you look at a lot of stuff he was doing, it's kind of thing that, you know, a lot of aboriginal tribes people do, you know, in terms of keeping trophies, you know, shrunken heads and so on and so forth. Anyway, over the years, I didn't really think about that when I was writing Deviant, but I have been thinking more and more

about it. And so, you know, we were able to work that into the graphic novel. Again, Eric did this amazing job of bringing it to visual life. You know, it's one of the things actually I'm happiest about about the novel. It's the, I mean, it is the standout portion of the graphic novel. Is this idea of gain tapping into some sort of like collective, tapping into the collective unconsciousness and bringing in, are you, Harold, are you a, have you

been a big believer in the collective unconsciousness? Absolutely. Not everybody knows this about me, but my scholarly background, you know, I did my PhD at a Jungian analysis of American literature. I mean, when I was doing my, I was very involved in the Jungian world for a while. I corresponded with Joseph Campbell, for example. You know, I took part in some major Jungian conferences. You know, I wrote a couple of books employing

Jungian psychology, often to works of popular art. So yeah, that's always been part of my intellectual background. Yeah, I want to talk with Eric here for a second, going back to what Marcus was talking about regarding the scene with Ed Gein fantasizing about himself as a pipe, as a pop icon. Did he have any ability to have anything like foresight? Did he, do you think he saw himself as anything other than what he was? Was he or was he that complex to understand what he

was doing was going to be remembered? Well, through the the reference material that Harold dug up, the, you know, he did have the psychologists, I don't have an exact reference, but the psychologist did say he had a skewed kind of elevated sense of himself. So I think there had to have been something in there that, you know, he fantasized himself being a little bit more substantial than he was. You know, he was. Well, when you think about Ed Gein, you almost think of

Levon Helm. He's the old dirt farmer. He seems like a very humble Wisconsin guy. So that aspect of him being self aware, digging up a grave, being like, they're going to remember this, like that adds another layer of true deviancy to steal Mr. Schechter's term. Because it does feel like he felt like the simpleton, right? I like this idea of that he was a lot more complex than he was just this guy like, I just like to make crafts like they had like a

whole series of layers. I think there was some vengeance that definitely went into his acts, you know, when he comes to some of the the graves that he chose to rob, but I'm not sure that he thought about anyone finding out about it. I don't mean there was vengeance in the in the grave robbing. So he would specifically grave rob out of spite. Yeah, he mentions a a time when someone took some money from him or something or someone had slided him. So he dug up

that person's mother. Oh, I took that as an act of some kind of active vengeance. So yeah. And it's almost like an act of vengeance towards his own mother as well because his mother had been buried with she had specifically requested there be a gigantic concrete block placed over her grave so he could never dig her up. He never like he not specifically so he could but he never had the ability to dig her up and he always dug up women that looked quite it was

always very much like his mother like, you know, the two women that he killed were very much like his mother, at least physically. Yeah. Well, yeah, I mean, you know, I think the psychological line on Dean was that his crimes expresses ambivalence he had about his mother. You know, he worshipped her but on another level, he obviously hated her and had all this homicidal fury. So he was both trying to reconstitute her but at the same time obviously performing

these atrocities on her body. By the way, I would say to me Gain reminds me or what I think about in terms of Gain is not so much leave on Helms, dirt farmer. I'm just writing about this somebody here. It's like I always think of him as like the citizens of Mayberry have just discovered that Barney Fife was a cross-dressing homicidal cycle. He probably was. We just did a documentary. Kissel and I were doing like talking

head stuff for a Jeffrey Dahmer documentary and it was really interesting going back through our material to like go talk to not sound like total fucking morons on the documentary. I was like going back through and I kind of refound myself like sympathizing with Jeffrey Dahmer. Like I ended up like going through his stuff and kind of seeing how like like obviously he's a monster but then I started to see his like humankind. Did something like that happen when

you go back to like really spelling out and drawing Ed Gain's life? Like is there a sympathy there or like do you see the humanity more or does he become more of a fucking alien? And to piggyback on Henry's point, I'm just looking at the the title here when you call him Eddie Gain and of course Eddie is a it's a sensitive it's kind of a term of endearment in a way. To me, it also was a nod to his childlike nature. He was really kind of stunted as a person

so that's why I like to use the term Eddie but I think I couldn't have done the book if I couldn't have a certain amount of compassion for him and what he went through and he was definitely a diseased mind for sure but you can have some sympathy for him for the way he was raised and the isolation he lived in and that you know contributed to him committing these crimes but I think through the research I actually started to have a little bit less sympathy as I

went along because of the just his attempts to lie in a very childlike way to to push the blame to someone else so he never accepted his own you know fault in any of these incidents. Yeah and also like when you go back and research some of those especially like the earlier books written about Ed Gain before Deviant some of the ones that that I found are not sympathetic in any way whatsoever. They're very harsh and a lot of them and some of them are very

trashy and will like to speculate of like actually he probably killed more like 10 or 15 people you know that go go way in the other direction. Well I mean I find it easy to feel a certain amount of sympathy for Dean. Is it because of your collection of human artifacts and the dress you wear of made of female breasts I've seen it honestly it's very ornate. It's really nice it's really nice. Just lucky I'm wearing my gold lame. No but you know the thing you know people

are always asking me in fact very recently with the book about becoming a you know how does it gain compared to other serial killers and my answer is you know that keen was not a serial killer in the strict sense of the term you know Deviant that phrase never appears you know the term serial killer when it first entered the language was used to describe the sadistic lust murderers you know Ted Bundy and John Wayne Gacy and so on and so forth Edmund Kemper you

know Dean wasn't a sadistic sex killer. You know he murdered these two women we're not condoning that you know but they were executed you know very very swiftly he basically just needed them as raw material for his you know doing yourself projects at home so you know he was essentially a necrophile in the grip of these very dark compulsions you know the fact again I mean you you know it's impossible to feel sympathy for Albert Fish. Yes yes that's the one you can't

that's the one that he's he's he's beyond the pale of all of them. Yeah but you can't feel sympathy for Bundy or Gacy either um you know but you know Gean is in a well you know he's sui generis he's in a category all by himself uh so what is it that Gean reflects about society that make him sympathetic? What does he reflect about society? Yeah why why is he sympathetic I mean he killed two people he's a grave robber he wore his mother's vagina why is he still somehow never wore his

mother's vagina he didn't have anything to do with his mother's mother's vagina I'm just gonna say you can't prove me wrong even if you can um but you know all of that macabre disgusting stuff aside you're right there is something sympathetic about him but what is it? I'm partly what I'm saying is relative yes of course it's like how Casey Anthony is a ten if you take into account all women who killed their their children um that wasn't Casey Anthony as a ten

yeah. Well look I mean he was this pathetic figure um and uh you know again in the grip of this very very bizarre ritualistic compulsion most of his victims were corpses uh that did not suffer at his hands uh so and you know and and you can feel sympathy with him just for the incredible look this is a guy who like the best thing that ever happened to him was when he was put in a mental institution you know right that that look on his that look on his face that one picture of him

like in the mental institution where he might as well be a Disneyland like he is so happy to finally have a bed yes exactly so anyway yeah so you know Eric maybe you maybe you can talk about that when it comes to animating uh someone like Ed Gein what kind of properties or character traits do you look to accentuate when you're uh you know doing something that I can't you know we now that we've dabbled in the comic book world I can't believe what people can do um because I can't

draw a stick figure but what do you look for uh I think I definitely tried to uh there were little things I tried to do to to make it uh sell an atmosphere or a feeling about the character and definitely when in relation to his mother I always had her kind of looming over him or yeah you know taller than him in every scene I try to never make uh then the same height or you know and I went to extremes on that uh especially during the segment with his childhood where I had him

you know inches high and she's just looming over and yeah I mean the the scene but like the way you put the the the famous scenes the famous Ed Gein scenes like the one that I think about most that was just so perfectly done that really put the Augusta as such a towering figures when Ed sees them uh slaughtering the hog you know which is when as he's a child like a back in the in the back shed like her towering over is like a almost like a more than a monster but a god right you know like you're

setting that up it's it's it's wonderful that's so brilliant that's all from Harold like he was speaking earlier about you know his the collective consciousness and everything and one of the great things in collaborating with this book is I had a simple idea that I I thought would be great and then you know when we were first collaborating uh and trying to figure out the direction we wanted the book to go he's he's telling me these these ideas that he had has an item I wasn't

sure that I was grasping where he was wanting to take it so uh it took a little while for me to get on board then as it started to sink in where he was going I got really excited about it and what were some of the ideas initially where he brought it up to you and you're like Mr. Schechter you are insane like what was wrong with you what's wrong with you am I safe where's the door how do I get out of this room what was an idea where you're like I don't bro I have no idea uh well just the the godlike

comparisons uh uh of of the mother and uh how he worshiped her as a god um it wasn't quite clicking with me until we we discussed it a little bit more and uh and now it's like you said it's it's the best part of the book um so that was definitely the biggest uh uh example of of uh trying to you know illustrate his his fear and love of mommy that's really awesome man that's brilliant Harold I have a I have to ask question you um I'm not gonna call you a no fun

fanny whoa I'm not gonna call you this he's a guest in our house he's a fun guy radio he tried to take hh homes from us right what he's been Harold Schechter has some revisionist ideas that hh homes which I honestly I'm with you that he didn't kill as many people inside of his murder hotel as right but you think that it was like that's exaggerated right yes I do yes I do yes no when it comes to Ed Gein this is in your research now like re-getting in do you

think Ed Gein had anything to do with killing his brother or like being there like do you think that that was that just negligence or was that like a plan um that's a tough one but uh if I were really pushed to give an answer which I obviously am this moment spotlights on you this is it um I think he probably did not kill his brother okay yeah and and you know I don't think he killed any of the other people that he was accused of killing uh you know again he wasn't uh you know

he killed Bernie swarden he killed Mary Hogan again he was running out of corpses in the local cemetery he needed to renew his supply of uh overweight middle-aged women uh so he can again go about doing his uh you know his home improvement jobs um and uh you know so again he went and executed them and so on but no I don't think he killed us you know it just doesn't seem like his MO that he would kill Henry do you think it's possible that he watched him die

that he could have saved him and just simply didn't well anything's possible um you know thank you thank you for giving us this Harold do you think it's I mean you know I mean breaking news Harold Schechter says anything well you know I mean if you wanted to tell yeah well I mean you know he could have killed Henry in any number of ways you know the fact that Henry died under those particular circumstances which were circumstances you know which other people had died in similar ways uh

you know leads me to believe that King probably did not kill him but at the same time you know it's entirely possible that he did not exactly regret that Henry died uh because again then he had Augusta all to himself oh my and who doesn't want Augusta all to themselves well so I mean so I guess the the whole thing with Henry I mean that's is was that just sort of the small town rumor mill because that's one of the things that I love about the book is that it really does capture

the small town rumor mill that created the edgine legend as we know it well I mean what I've discovered in researching a number of books including one that I published recently uh you know plug it rich yeah oh wonderful book called maniac about the bath school disaster of 1927 the worth school massacre in US history but you know after the guy uh whose name was Andrew Keeho blew up the school there all these stories arose that he'd been responsible for killing his stepmother his stepmother had died

years before when a gas oven exploded you know after Keeho committed this atrocity you know everybody started talking about how he had killed his his stepmother I mean that happens a lot you know where you know again retrospectively uh these killers are accused of all these crimes that they didn't commit so you know that's my that's my best guess about about Henry yeah the turns from he probably did it to he did it once it goes from person to person to person yeah exactly well it's

definitely a good time to be a serial killer if all of a sudden you find out there's a grave robber next door and you're like I think the heat's off yeah somebody's creepier than me exactly I one more question for herald's about like just the obvious to conjecture Eric to please chime in on this because now you're in the edgine world you're now in this shit too you've been able to experience all of this he's drawn his penis what do you think would have happened if he wasn't caught

like do you think that like he would have just continued on in his little world or do you think that he would have really had to go and search for bodies because I do that is interesting the idea of he is just a practical quote unquote practical killer where it's just about art supplies right uh I think he would have uh I think he would have escalated I think he would have killed more people I think he was very comfortable with the fact that he killed Mary Hogan in the tavern

and got away with it so much that he told everyone that she was at his house and yeah yeah she's at my house right now you're like oh yeah so I think if if that had happened with Bernice Warden then he would have been more emboldened to to find other victims when he couldn't find a fresh grave well he wasn't a clever criminal no not at all he's not a powerful kind of predator type like a Ted Bundy or with somebody like even John Wayne Gacy their new peacock documentary actually

really focus in how much of a predator he was um and he edgine was just kind of dumb yeah Harold what do you think what would have happened to ed do you think yeah I mean I don't see him you know all of a sudden stopping his necrophiliac activities and possibly again when he ran out of available corpses killing other women although you know it's hard to know how many middle-aged stout women in the community who were minded of his mother

there were it was Wisconsin it was gonna be just fine and I say that with all the love in the world but doesn't that then because Harold you said he wasn't a serial killer but you then but now I got you but now you're saying he may have continued on killing if he wasn't caught so then what's why not just call him a serial killer if if you think you continue I you know I'm kind of a purist when it comes to the term serial killer in the sense that he's a he's a loose more

tap a guy okay I'm sorry exactly so you saw like mindhunter and stuff right you know all those you know FBI profilers who are trying to get a picture of the psychology of these people you know they were talking to Edmund Kemper and people like that in other words the phrase was specifically used for these compulsive sex murderers who got their you know ecstatic orgasmic pleasure from torture overpowering and torturing these helpless victims you know that was not gene

in other words what I'm saying is like to me it's not just like a quantitative thing sure you know it's like contract killers are and serial killers I mean they kill a bunch of people do you know what I'm saying yeah so you know that's why I don't in that sense I don't regard keen as a serial killer interesting now that actually I was I was wondering about that because I actually don't remember from our research our research etkin's crimes did have sort of a sexual nature

or did he not brought to orgasm by his stuff or was it really just him moving through this ritualistic behavior it's a moment of contention there's a tiny bit of contention about that well I'll let Eric answer in a minute but my own so the way I think about it you know in my book I have a deviant have chapter on necrophiles famous necrophiles and there are a couple of very famous french necrophiles including this guy who's known as sergeant per tron and he would dig up the corpses of these

you know young women and have sex with them you know which is classic necrophilia classic classic vintage yes I think that is yeah now I think of that as a very American necrophile in other words he wasn't you know like for tron was like peppy lapieu or something you know ed basically would you know take these corpses home and and do home improvement projects with you know I mean he wasn't so much interested in having sex with them

you know whether he might have attempted I mean he claimed that he didn't have sex with them because they quote unquote smell too bad oh you know which suggested he might the thought might have crossed his body yeah maybe the ass body spray would have changed the whole mood I mean it's I mean serious question it is was he an emotional necrophile like where people have physical affairs and emotional affairs like was was it necrophilia for him a purely emotional thing you know digging up female corpses bringing them home

putting them in your bed I mean there is an erotic element to it no doubt but my feeling is and again who knows that it might never have gotten to the point where he was actually trying to consummate the relationship with lucky guy Eric when and this is a really going to be a hard hitting question when it comes to drawing an orgasm face how do you do how do you capture the uncomfortability mixed with the exaltation mixed with the like oh no Mary does it's it's not an easy task and on top of that

you tried drawing an orgasmic face wearing a skin mask I just would put I'd go and get some ham at the store I'd set up a mirror and I just kind of pace it around it just go oh oh do you want to make vulnerable noises yeah I think I disagree with Harold on this one though that I believe that he he was a straight-up necrophile just based on the the way that he lied when he was being questioned it like I said it was very childlike

and evasive and strategically evasive and if you go through and read his uh some of his questioning where he says like you know they they keep hounding him about some of these topics and he goes well I I did try but I wasn't successful and then the questioner is like are you saying you didn't reach orgasm and he's like oh yeah that's it I didn't reach orgasm and then right and then he yeah yeah yeah but yeah yeah and then he voluntarily adds uh you know when they ask him about

uh Mary Hogan he says uh they said so did you try with Mary Hogan he's like no I never did that that I can remember you know he's basically he may have gotten too many pbrs going to the old drama defense so I mean my my opinion and and this is kind of the the way we went in the book was that you know just from his evasiveness and and the the way he answered the questions I personally come to the conclusion that that he uh was uh straight up using these bodies for sex but again like Carol said who's

who's done up again you know this is I want to ask this question is a general question to the group about serial killer confessions because I think that that's a thing it comes it's a theme in last podcast on the left and we've been talking about it for years just interpersonally the idea of why do some serial killers make shit up to fuck with people like technically we could say that Ted Bundy's after career his post-prison time was a lot of him spinning yarns same thing with Henry Lee Lucas yeah um right he's a confession killer he

basically said yeah yeah yeah I killed all of them I did all of this horrible shit but then why are there some serial killers like I'm going to use I'm just going to say Ed Gein but I know for today he's not but like Ed Gein or like other people that are ashamed to say their most dark secrets like that there's something about that where like I do feel like there's something about the relationship with him with Ed Gein into the to the dead body that he almost felt like it's a kiss and tell scenario and he

doesn't want to do it and they're not going to tell that's the best part I mean for him yeah well I mean you know my answer a partial answer is that um excuse me as I'm sure you know I mean it's characteristic of a lot of serial killers that they have this megalomania which you know I think it's a reaction against having been made to feel like shit when they were growing up you know so they you know part of the whole you know part of the whole satisfaction they get from the

crime you know it's a sense of this power they wield it's one of the reasons they taunt the police and so on and so forth so yeah I mean I think that bragging about you know the number of people they killed and what amazing you know world-class killers they are and how they've outwitted law enforcement for so long you know as part of the gratification of the crimes um and then you know that when you were talking before about uh Jeffrey Dahmer I mean one of the things that to me

has always made him if not totally sympathetic but again not as unirredeemably evil as somebody like Ted Bundy you know is that when he was captured he did seem to feel genuine remorse uh and you know I think he effectively committed suicide um because you know he asked not to be put in isolation in prison he knew he was going to be killed uh so he was caught in a cycle that he couldn't could understand he couldn't get out of and then he just kept going and going it seemed to be a relief that when he was

caught yes exactly well building off of that question you know it's is that Dean a psychopath well I mean supposedly you know he was psychotic not a psychopath um according to the shrinks who you know who examined him uh you know he was having these various hallucinations visual hallucinations auditory hallucinations olfactory hallucinations do you think that's real and not a story that he was telling do you think he was really seeing these things

I think there was some element to that yeah I do think he was probably you know again his uh you know with psycho everybody came to believe that schizophrenia meant you know you have a double personality but you know schizophrenia means you have a shattered personality uh and you know I think partly it was that shattering of the of Ed Gein's psyche that allowed all that primordial weird religious stuff you know ritualistic stuff to emerge and take over so well you know yeah you bring up

psycho herald and I want to talk with Eric here because uh in this article that I'm reading uh you talk about you know every kid who grew up in the 80s told stories about the 1950s ghoul but it seems like the 1950s ghoul is still talked about today we have stories like Luca Magnata we hear about horrible atrocities happening all the time we do a show called side stories every week people are getting dug up and god knows what happens to everyone they're having sex with stuffed animals some of these people

do you ever think we're going to get into the lore that we have around the 1950s around the 1960s that era of true crime nostalgia the mystique around it do you think we're ever going to see anything like that again uh I'm not sure that it's it's like world war two you know that how many movies are going to have about world war two it's just a moment in time that is so uh just fascinating but what do you think makes that time period endlessly fascinating the fact that we're no cameras it seems like a totally

different world because it's still recent enough to be like dang dude like he's chill as a grandson alive perhaps obviously edgene didn't procreate but theoretically yeah edgene is just one of those fairy tale monsters to me that was just kind of also singular he was singular because there was no true crime like there was pulp fiction but there was no like full-on like serial killer books like we have now it feels like i must maybe i'm speaking out of turn but it feels like he had no sense of reference to say like yeah i should

start making pussy chains like oh yeah this is oh oh definitely need to do this he did i mean his point of reference are the concentration camps and the the things that were supposedly the things that were supposedly happening in the cult like you know elsa coke and you know those uh types of people that were supposedly making lampshades and soap out of uh human skin it is that boogeyman kind of thing that keeps going from generation to generation like well in the article you mentioned uh when i was a kid it was it wasn't psycho it was

texas chainsaw master yeah everyone went around and said did you you know that's based on a real guy dude they told me it was a documentary i believed it the first time i watched it i was like this is filmed live so it was like we all knew when i was a kid we all knew who edgene was because of texas chainsaw master i guess if i could compare it to something it's like the universal monsters right like wolfman like it's all like they they have all the monsters all the monsters have been created and edgene is one of those

true crime universal monsters and i just wonder if um what that fraternity of weirdos what that looks like 20 years from now if there's maybe there's an edgene happening right now that will be talking if they're listen if you're an edgene if your email side stories do not contact me well i mean one of the things about gene again is that his crimes you know there's this image of the fifties which to some extent is true like all stereotypes uh you know this being very

bland kind of happy days leave it to beaver eisenhower era you know and here in the midst of it uh in you know small town usa you know there are all these unspeakable incomprehensible horrors taking place uh inside this again middle american farmhouse um you know they it does seem like a real life fairytale you know it's like you know it was tell people it seems like a real life fairytale herald that is it is not a fairytale maybe it's fairy tales a fairy tale

i'll tell you you know fairy tales it's all incredible i know well let's say folk tale you know like in every small town and even when i was growing up in the bronx in my apartment building you know there's always you know all the kids are always telling tales it's like boo radley you know and in uh in to kill a mockingbird you know there's always one creepy house again in my case one creepy apartment you know where some cannibalist you know old hag lives or some creep and you know in gene's case it turned out to be true yeah yeah you know what i'm

saying yeah so you know it's like this universal folk story and it turned out to be true and so that's part of fascinating and if there's one i really do feel like if there's one there has to be more there has to have been more edgings that didn't get caught i really do believe that you will bust into somebody's house is that is for clothes somewhere in this country and you will find the same weird collection well i mean i think what's really interesting about that that time period

in that area the country is that you know i think it was you how do you did go through it in devian is just how many like they blamed more murders on edgene because so many murders were happening in this weird small area of wisconsin and also like at this time period uh charles starkweather and carol m fugates killing spree was what two years before a year before something like that like the midwest was wildly violent and in this time period even when i went out to uh to that area to do my research

i was told that that area of wisconsin had a higher per capita murder rate than new york city did um you know that was right by my hometown i didn't kill anyone though he didn't so anyway yeah uh you know the other thing about the 50s by the way um which goes back to my childhood i'm like way older obviously than you guys uh you know it i don't see it well thank you it's the gold lamé but um you know it was people don't realize i mean

american pop culture was pervaded with horror stuff i mean i grew up there was all this incredible horror stuff you know there were the ec horror comics yeah there were all those you know that was the time when those universal monsters the first being shown on tv there were all these like friday night creature feature shows you know and you'd go to the saturday matinee which back then cost a quarter um and you know tell me more and you know you see double feature of all these you know roger korman horror movies

and the incredible shrinking man and all that stuff so you know there was a lot of horror stuff in the in the 50s and again all this emerging imagery of the death camps which had so much influence on guine's crime so you know there was really a dark underside to the 50s you know i think that's one of the things that psychoteps into is this kind of duality of that period it seemed to be the shock and the ptsd from world war two and no one really wanted to maybe talk about the

fact that the entire world was in a embroiled in a conflict that ended with an atomic bomb being dropped on a bunch of people you know it ended with fucking hundreds of thousands of people melting so i think on some level like you legitimately the entire world went through bullshit and then we went through an economic boom so in america was like yeah everybody go on buy microwaves we just made them don't want to talk about where they came from but you know me go buy them you know this kind of shit but you like maytag it's these two

like levels where it's economic prosperity mixed with a bunch of people who just like were killing people for the time they were 18 years old right yep yep i only have one small modification to make about your statement please they didn't they didn't have microwaves you've been shekter i'm actually really surprised we haven't seen more modern edgings especially during quarantine i don't know we've seen some tiktok videos we've seen some tiktok videos

that are borderline this is some prime grave robbing time absolutely again thank you guys so much for being with us herald shekter eric powell authors of did you hear what eddie geene done my last question is for both of you eric working with a more traditional author and and herald being more of a traditional author working in more of the graphic novel phase we can start with herald what was that experience like was it different for you than writing a full novel and

what was that experience yeah it was great because eric did most of the work that's what we're discovering as comic book writers that you're like you're writing me like well hope you know how to decipher that so yeah that was uh for my point of view uh an ideal collaboration yeah um i had never worked on a non-fiction book before so that that was quite a a leap for me and and i found out how easy it was to fall down a rabbit hole and try to like you know chase one little bit of information until you've you know

sometimes to the point where it's like i had to stop myself this will never be in the book you know right yeah but it was it was amazing working with herald it's like i uh i it's an experience i'll never be able to recreate i'm sure because i i had the opportunity to work with one of my favorite authors and if you've ever read a book and and and finished it and was like oh i'd love to ask that guy about this you know i got to do that every day yeah and it was awesome you know now you can call him all night

like that's the best part you have his number now yeah you can call him and call him yeah what kind of stitch do you think he used exactly and then who'd be like did you know in the 1950s that didn't have microwaves you'd be like we know well awesome um anything else guys i just herald what you said you've been reading comic books forever what what are your what are some of your favorites uh well it's a little bit of a painful subject for me oh because i had to i had to sell my uh first

mint condition uh 50 50 issues of spider man mint condition to pay for my first divorce oh my goodness oh god i just i feel that in my nervous system yeah Jesus christ um yeah no i was actually an aspiring comic book artist myself actually applied for a job at marvel comics i still have my rejection letter from stanley's secretary um but yeah i mean i loved steve ditko i have to say steve ditko is probably my favorite artist nice i love joe coubert i always love sergeant rock and easy company uh i

love gill canes green lantern uh jack curbie of course uh as eric knows i i actually um uh bought i had until recently an original jack curbie fantastic four page which um i ended up auctioning off when i discovered how much it was worth and i was too nervous to have it around my house second divorce you gotta save some of us for the second divorce herald honestly i'm looking out for you man so yeah i can tell myself if i hadn't gotten divorced you know i wouldn't have had my

children i'd still have my comic book collection and you know sometimes i'm not sure which and i suppose eric same question for you um i'm so busy right now that i i kind of live in a cave when it comes to what's what's on the shelves and there's so much amazing stuff being done right now we're really going through like a golden another golden age of comics and there's so much unique original material out there not just the marvel and dc stuff there's so many awesome creators out there doing their own

thing it's kind of impossible to keep up with it but i follow creators and i tend to buy whatever they do jess smith is a guy that i buy everything he does yep um you know yeah and i'm such a big fan of your work like i still like anytime we uh and the way you approach everything too like anytime we've ever gotten nominated for anything i always think of peaches valentine when you got nominated for an eisner that actually that that's stuck in my that is stuck in my head for decades

of just like that yeah i think that's why i don't get nominated for eisners anymore well it's to tell that i guess to tell the page is that when eric got nominated for an eisner award for the goon which the eisner award is the oscars of comic books yeah it's a big deal no he drew a character called peaches valentine which is a man with a diaper full of shit and he shit full and he filled the diaper up with shit and then reached into the diaper and rubbed it all over his head and helped sign that says eisner award nominee

yeah man and that was not a knock on the eisners it was a knock on myself because yeah i i literally had a character in the book that played in his own shit and got nominated for the greatest award in comics so yeah that's making fun of myself but again you know yeah that was that that was that stuck with that is stuck with me that till to this day but it helps yeah it really does help awesome uh henry guys no man i'm just so happy to talk to you guys i the i'm the you know herald you you are you birthed us

how does that feel you didn't you made that make you feel yeah no thank i love talking to you guys and by the way i gotta thank you guys for turning them into wolfenstein oh yeah bro game is so dope awesome the name of the book is did you hear what eddie gein done herald checker in eric powell it was awesome thank you guys so much thank you guys so much for having us so good to pick you guys's brain round of applause for all of us for the best interview we've ever done so humble

i me it sometimes though while it's good to remain humble you also have to celebrate yourself a little bit well thank you all so much for listening to this special episode of blast podcast on the left we hope you enjoyed it and again we love driving as much traffic as possible to move books for authors and you guys are so great and helping authors survive in a world that's not freaking easy because believe it or not writing isn't exactly a get rich game so thank you all so much for supporting these guys again the name of the book

did you hear what eddie gein done marcus one thing you learned one thing that i learned i learned that things are not always what they seem but nice they can sometimes be what you think and also what you believe and at the same time being something that you don't really think but also it's not what it seems always that's why you don't date that is fantastic has tony brown beautiful nipples yes he does okay everyone thank you so much for listening hail yourselves so get we got live tickets go to last

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