Union Station

By Ande Parks

Kansas City, 1933. Frank Nash is a petty criminal being escorted back into town by train. FBI agent Vetterli, waiting for the convoy at Union Station, is expecting a routine assignment. What happens at Union Station that day is a massacre, with no one knowing who really pulled the trigger first. Newspaper reporter, Charles Thompson, is a witness to the events at Union Station and begins a personal investigation that may cost him his life, and that of his family. In the tradition of Torso and Road to Perdition, UNION STATION is the true story that started J. Edgar Hoover's "war on crime" and helped shape the FBI into the agency it is today.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1934964271
• ISBN13: 9781934964279
• Release Date: November 2003
• Publisher: Oni Press
• Length: 120 Pages
• Weight: 0.46 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.4" x 6.6" x 8.7"
• Age Range: 16 years and up
• Grade Range: Grade 11 and higher

Customer Reviews

You may want to know something about this event in history before comitting to this

This suffers from the intrinsic difficulty of dealing with a historical event that will never be known correctly since the actual facts couldn't be taken out of those involved while they lived. THAT DOES NOT EFFECT THE RATING. The artist did not come close to drawing unique enough characters BUT he had his own intrinsic difficulty of them all being white men around the same age that dressed pretty much the same. He still could have done much better so he still takes blame. THE SOLUTION: A Dramitis Personae would tremendously helped distinguish the characters and would have also addressed the other problem I had with this ambitious (The effort is what really counts to me) project. The equally-problematic flaw was how often the scenes drastically changed without enough clarity about where we were and why we were there. This also made the questions of "who?" amplify.

True Crime

This is a very worthwhile read for anyone who is interested in the Depression era, particularly in gangsters of the period. The fact that it is a "graphic novel" may be distracting to some, but nevertheless, it is a well crafted story that tells the events of of the massacre at Kansas City's Union Station that allowed J. Edgar Hoover to gain the publicity and clout he needed to fully arm his G-men and be given a free hand in law enforcement from that day forward. FBI men even today will still swear that Pretty Boy Floyd was at the scene, despite a good amount of evidence to the contrary. IF one is to nitpick, the only failings of this book is that by creating fictional characters and putting some real people in places they were not (which the author Ande Parks admits in his notes), it undoes the very thing it seems to set out to do, which is do an authentic, factual retelling of the true story. Overall, though, very good.