Jake Tapper Drew Every Panel of His Nazi-Hunter Graphic Novel

CNN anchor Jake Tapper has spent three years drawing a graphic novel about Klaus Barbie, the Nazi known as the "Butcher of Lyon," and he drew every panel himself. Top Shelf Productions will publish "The Butcher: The Decades-Long Hunt for Klaus Barbie, One of the World's Most Notorious Killers" on June 1, 2027.

The book traces Barbie's trajectory from his terrorizing of Lyon, France, through his decades on the run, to his eventual capture in Bolivia. Tapper built the account from source material in four different languages. He first became interested in the story while visiting France with his family.

"It's just this fascinating story about this young Nazi who comes to Leon, France, terrorizes the city, and then pops up years later in South America in Bolivia," Tapper said in a recent interview. "He also helped support a right-wing government in South America before eventually being captured."

The journalist also presents what the report calls eyebrow-raising information about who helped Barbie escape Europe. What that information is, the announcement does not say. Readers will have to wait for publication.

Why a graphic novel?

Tapper, who anchors "The Lead" and "State of the Union" on CNN, has written eight books, including three novels. Comics, however, are a lifelong preoccupation. As a child he read Charles Schulz's "Peanuts," Walt Kelly's "Pogo," and superhero titles including Batman and Superman. His home office holds strips of "Little Orphan Annie," "Doonesbury" and "Zippy the Pinhead." His cartoons have appeared in Roll Call, in Dartmouth's college paper when he attended, and in his hometown paper, The South Street Star. For a time he drew a fresh piece for CNN's "State of the Union."

"It's a very American art form," Tapper said of the medium. "There's just a brilliance. It's not filmed, but it's not written. It's somewhere in between."

Top Shelf's catalog gives the project a serious pedigree: the publisher has released Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell's "From Hell," George Takei's "They Called Us Enemy," and the "March" trilogy co-written by Congressman John Lewis. Tapper said he chose Top Shelf partly because its editors challenged him with notes that could be "absolutely brutal" — notes he welcomed.

What does this change for viewers of his CNN work?

Likely nothing. CNN viewers have not seen Tapper's end-of-show political cartoons in several years, and he explained why with unusual candor: the form demands a hardness his anchor role forbids.

"The truth of the matter is that I stopped doing it because the best political cartoons are really hard hitting, and I just, as an anchor, I just couldn't do cartooning the way that it deserves to be done," Tapper said. "I had to hold back. I had to pull punches. I had to run towards silly and inoffensive as opposed to hard hitting and brutal. And it just wasn't as good. I wasn't happy with it."

The graphic novel, by contrast, let him work without compromise — and at punishing length. "After I finished the 250th page, I went back and redrew 100 pages because I'm like, those are awful. And I need to redraw them," he said. He draws less frequently now, and the project has restored some of his skill, though "I'm still going back and tweaking."

"I didn't want it to be fast," he said of the project. "I wanted it to be good."

The book also draws on a direct investigative line: Tapper worked with the daughter of Allan Ryan, a former U.S. Department of Justice official who investigated how Barbie avoided punishment for so long. Ryan appears in the graphic novel as a kind of narrator.

Tapper frames the result as a suspense story, not a lecture. "It's obviously a very serious topic, but it's kind of a suspenseful book about how they track down this mass murderer who'd gotten away with it," he said. "And then it gets into the politics of it, but in a very accessible way, about all the people that let this guy get away."

He knows the medium choice may raise eyebrows. His answer is simple: "It's not about 2026 politics at all. It's just a true story."