Many of the stories, interviews and analyses Jake Tapper presents to his followers on CNN rely heavily on moving pictures, courtesy of his employer. A new project from the anchor and author will substitute still images — that Tapper drew himself.
Tapper has spent the past three years working on a graphic novel, and much of his time was spent drawing every panel. “The Butcher: The Decades-Long Hunt for Klaus Barbie, One of the World’s Most Notorious Killers,” will publish on June 1, 2027, from Top Shelf Productions. The illustrated novel examines the story of Klaus Barbie, the Nazi figure known as the “Butcher of Lyon” who escaped Germany and avoided capture for decades, until Nazi hunters and journalists tracked him down. Tapper, who first became interested in the story while visiting France with his family, used source material in four different languages to chronicle the pursuit for Barbie in excruciating detail.
“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,” says the CNN anchor during a recent interview. “He also helped support a right-wing government in South America before eventually being captured.” In what may be a surprising twist, the journalist presents eyebrow-raising information about who helped Barbie escape Europe.
Graphic novels are a favored medium of younger readers who not only read coming-of-age tales or longer stories involving fictional characters, but also memoirs that deeply probe cultures or perspectives that may not turn up in more mainstream media formats. Top Shelf, Tapper’s publisher, has released graphic novels such as “From Hell” by Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell, “They Called Us Enemy” by actor George Takei, and the “March” trilogy co-written by Congressman John Lewis.
Tapper may best be known for anchoring “The Lead” and “State of the Union” on CNN as well as some special news events, but he has long juggled his news job with a suite of other activities. He has written eight books, including three novels.
What people may not know about him is that he has been drawn to comics and cartooning for most of his life. As a child, he avidly read Charles Schulz’ “Peanuts” and Walt Kelly’s “Pogo,” as well as super-heroes like Batman and Superman. His home office contains strips of “Little Orphan Annie,” “Doonesbury” and “Zippy the Pinhead.” Some of his work has been seen in Roll Call, the college paper at Dartmouth when he attended, and even in a local paper, The South Street Star, where he grew up. For a period of time, he drew a fresh piece for CNN’s “State of the Union”
“It’s a very American art form,” he says of the medium. “There’s just a brilliance. It’s not filmed, but it’s not written. It’s somewhere in between.”
Still, CNN viewers haven’t seen the end-of-show political cartoons he once drew in several years. “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 says. “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.”
He’s had a lot of time to work on “The Butcher.” Tapper, who says he draws less frequently now, has been tough on himself. “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.” The recent practice has helped him regain some of his skill, he says, but “I’m still going back and tweaking.”
One reason he embraced Top Shelf as his publisher is because he admired other graphic novels they have produced and he liked the fact that the editors there challenged him, with notes that could be “absolutely brutal.” Tapper embraced them. “I didn’t want it to be fast,” he says of the project. “I wanted it to be good.”
He hopes the new graphic novel will have appeal. “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 says. “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. I think anybody who’s interested in in a mystery, anybody who’s interested in World War II, anybody who’s interested in just a good yarn” will find something in the project. Tapper even worked with the daughter of Allan Ryan a former U.S. Department of Justice official who investigated how Barbie was able to avoid punishment for so long. He places Ryan in the graphic novel, where he serves as a sort of narrator.
Tapper knows that some people may be surprised by his work in the medium, but believes the tale will win them over. “It’s not about 2026 politics at all,” he says. “It’s just a true story.”