Set in Little, Rock, Arkansas in 1946, Jensen and Powell’s riveting new graphic novel Two Dead is a vivid example of fiction grounded in the brutal historical realities of race, politics, and crime during the period. Based on research by Jensen, a former crime reporter, the graphic novel is the story of Gideon Kemp, a returning WWII veteran and trained law enforcement officer, secretly recruited to the police force by the city’s mayor in an effort to put an end to the sadistic, violent tenure of the longtime Police Chief Bailey. A delusional racist, warped and haunted by an incident from his past, Bailey is, nevertheless, obsessed with destroying the lunatic Mafia chief running the local crime scene—by any means necessary. In this 10-page excerpt we also meet two African American brothers—Jacob, a war hero who runs the local unofficial black police force, and Esau, who works for the demented crime boss—in a gripping fictional evocation of the lurid and violent social landscape of the 1940s racist American south. Two Dead by Van Jensen and Nate Powell (the artist for March, John Lewis’s acclaimed Civil Rights graphic memoir) will be published by Gallery 13 this month.