Comic Book Conspiracy

http://www.realdetroitweekly.com/article_3798.shtml

By Thomas Matich
Feb 5, 2008
T. Casey Brennan
Comic Book Conspiracy

Ann Arbor was host to a gathering at a house I had never visited before. On the back porch, with my red plastic cup freshly filled from the keg, I sipped and exhaled winter breath. That night I encountered T. Casey Brennan, the man who, legend has it, shot JFK.

Brennan started writing comics in the late-'60s with Warren Publishing’s horror series Eerie. As the '70s stormed ahead, Brennan penned tales for Warren horror magazines Creepy and Vampirella and DC Comics’ House of Mystery among countless others.

“I began reading them in kindergarten in September of 1953,” Brennan says. “I was five-years-old, it was a one-room school on a gravel road, no inside toilet or running water and the teacher had to shovel coal. There was a kid that had a massive collection of old time comic books and I began reading them and I became very enamored by the whole concept.”

With his stories, Brennan loved to create his own world and he used language like a machine gun, peppering his prose with vivid Vampirella speech bubbles that took readers on a creepy joy ride. By 1990, Brennan’s activism to remove cigarette smoking from comics caused then Arkansas Governor, Bill Clinton, to designate January as “T. Casey Brennan Month.”

Now, 59-year-old Brennan is homeless, nearly nomadic, splitting time in cities such as Ann Arbor, Pittsfield and Ypsilanti. He enjoys going to parties and in my email correspondences with him, he often asks if I know of any bashes. He considers himself a street-punk and feels that America has reached a cultural revolution that is genuine, unlike the hippies.

“I hated hippies then. I hate them now. Woodstock should’ve been napalmed,” Brennan says. “There’s nothing on this earth more sickening to me than a hippie."

In 2003, a car hit Brennan. He suffered post-concussion syndrome, a bleeding liver and a hernia. He had to learn how to talk again and with the help of some punk rock kids that took him in, he says he learned a different concept of what constitutes good and bad artistically.

In an email, Brennan sent me two Conjurella stories, where he writes about his involvement in the JFK assassination as an unwilling teenager through hazy, suspenseful recollections that involve CIA MK-ULTRA mind control and Nazi experiments. A few days later, I sit with Brennan at a Starbucks in Ann Arbor and ask him if his JFK stories are fact or fiction, to which Brennan says he’s willing to testify and take a polygraph. But it seems certain people don’t want the truth exposed, as he’s received death threats and political persecution. “If people want to deal with the JFK stuff at all, they want to deal with it as art that tests the limits of freedom of expression,” Brennan says. “Nobody wants to hear that I am telling the truth. But I take my fucking life … my reputation in my hands every time I’m forced to admit that.” RDW

T. Casey Brennan’s comics are available at Vault of Midnight: 219 S. Main St., Ann Arbor.