I Witnessed: The Great Train Robbery of 1963: A Graphic Novel by Andrea Debbink and Crystal Jayme (illustrator) is a graphic novel that is fiction and fact mixed together for a modern Nancy Drew-like adventure. It is the second in the series, but each is stand alone as the first book was I Witnessed: The Lizzie Borden Story by Jeramey Kraatz and Crystal Jayme.
This story is easy. Someone (in the case of The Great Train Robbery, an aspiring journalist teen girl), witnesses the action that takes place. Here, we have Marilyn who has an argument with her mother about being sent to boarding school (among other things) and she thinks her father can help talk her mother out of it, so she hatches a plan to go to London (where her father is a reporter) from Glasgow and talk to him. But the only way she can think of is to stowaway on the mail train to the city. A mail train that has the biggest shipment ever: money. Lots of it. And somehow thieves have learned of it, plan on robbing it and if they get away with it, will carry out the most brazen train robbery of the century. Well, it mostly doesn’t go as planned, Marilyn finds a way to track down the thieves (after seeing the theft), gathers evidence, finds her way to London (to one pissed off dad) and meets a fellow reporter coworker of her fathers. We see all of this “before” (as the actual book starts with Marilyn on Fleet Street a few days after the robbery and she’s buying a newspaper) as she speaks to the reporter.
The characters are mostly actual participants (willing and otherwise) of the crime, the facts of the case are presented within the story itself and in sidebars detailing information from how much the money was worth today to how much evidence was left behind, to who the inside man might have been and even where one robber had hidden for months before capture. Some pieces do not have explanations (such as if the robbers hired someone to clean up the hideout, why was there so much evidence left behind) and that is where Marilyn comes in to fill those blanks (anonymous tips to the police anyone?) Do I like the characters? Well, half are the robbers so no, the others you don’t see much and Marilyn I’m on the fence about (is she going to be a good reporter? Sure. Do I want to be friends with her? Maybe).
The illustrations are the roundup piece. They are not overly detailed, the colors are only green (or a greenish) and some blacks, and while that is not overly pleasant to the eye, it sets a scene and the tone as being both a mystery and historical as events are set in only a few weeks of 1963. I would have liked to see more of the time setting (outfits, maybe some popular music was being played) but overall it was a decent addition to things.
