Remembering Marv Heemeyer's Killdozer Rampage 21 Years Later

The Granby cartoonist who goes by the nom de plume Mister V (real name: Matt Veraldo) had originally planned to have the full graphic novel collecting all of his serial work on the story of Marv Heemeyer and his Dozer rampage out by the fifteenth anniversary of that bizarre event.

That anniversary passed six years ago.

So instead, he did it for the twentieth anniversary: June 4, 2024. "That's how long it took me to finish," Mister V says.

The project, Dozer Manifesto, has been a web comic since 2019, focusing on the 2004 homegrown terrorist-like attack on Granby for which local welder Marv Heemeyer had built — and used, to terrifying and destructive effect — a homemade tank. Heemeyer drove it into buildings occupied by those that he thought had wronged him over the years: a concrete plant, the offices of Mountain Parks Electric, the town hall, Liberty Savings Bank, the Sky-Hi News headquarters and Xcel Energy, as well as private homes and other small businesses. He shot .50-caliber bullets at propane tanks and electric transformers in a failed attempt to blow everything up. Ultimately, he shot himself inside the bulldozer.

"It was a tragedy on so many levels," says Mister V. "And honestly, a miracle that he didn't kill anyone else before taking his own life."

Right now, the saga-length series can be read for free online at both Webtoons and The Duck Webcomics; a physical book collecting it all is in the works.

In the meantime, Heemeyer and his manifesto — "I was always willing to be reasonable until I had to be unreasonable" — has inspired such other commercial and creative ventures as an action figure, songs like the bluegrass band Bowregard's "A Reasonable Man (Killdozer)," a metal band named Heemeyer, and the book Killdozer: The True Story of the Colorado Bulldozer Rampage, by Patrick Brower, who was the editor of the Sky-Hi News the day it was attacked. The book in turn inspired a 2019 documentary, Tread, which aired on Netflix.
The comic project took longer than expected, Mister V says, because of how complex and far-reaching the event really was, especially for the local community of Granby, which barely crests a couple thousand residents. "There were times during the process when someone from town would come into my life with a story to tell about Marv or what he did," Mister V says, and that slowed things down. He mentions one young woman featured in the web comic who had worked for Heemeyer and described him as a generous and kind, if somewhat reserved, member of the community.

It's that juxtaposition of the man Heemeyer was to so many with the man who'd go down in Colorado history as the person behind one of its most destructive and deluded disasters that also slowed down the creative process. "It took me to some pretty dark places," Mister V admits. "There were times I just had to take a break for a while and get back into my own head. I didn't realize when I started the project that it was going to mess with my own mental stability. I just thought it was a good story — a great story — and one that needed to be told. But it turned out to be a Herculean effort, and I am no Hercules."

It's a credit to Mister  V's work — and a career focused on illustrating Colorado history that he's been building since 2009 — that Dozer Manifesto isn't just a retelling of some of the more dramatic and even graphic details of Heemeyer's rampage. While it pulls no punches in terms of detail, it also takes the time to explore Heemeyer’s life and backstory: who he was and why he did what he did. It uses not only the audiotapes left behind by the 52-year-old Heemeyer himself, but also goes far deeper, reconstructing the town and its people and politics through both historical research and personal narratives of many who knew him. The result is an intimate, humbling and unflinchingly honest portrait of a good man’s spiral into insanity, going so far as to examine the wounds he left behind on the community he demolished — and some of the wounds psychologically inflicted on Mister V in the narrative process.

Mister V comes by all of this honestly: He's a longtime resident of Granby. Although he was raised in Lakewood, his family bought a summer house in Granby in 1992 — right around the time that Heemeyer bought his property in town. Mister V's family spent every summer living in Granby — they were, he admits, what the locals would call "weekenders," despite the fact that they'd be there for months at a time. The small-town life ultimately drew him there full-time, and his comic strips Life Is Grand and Them There Hills were featured for seven years in Kremmling’s Grand Gazette. In 2017, he was nominated for a DiNKy Award for Outstanding Colorado Achievement; his prior graphic novel, Mile High: Adventures in Colorado Medical Marijuana, was published in 2019 by 8th Wonder Press.
So Mister V knows all too well the dangerous ground on which he's treading with Dozer Manifesto, at least in terms of his own neighbors. Heemeyer is still recalled fondly by some, and very much not by others. His name has become something of a noun, a point the artist makes in the narrative: Those in Granby will talk about someone being "such a Marv," or warn a friend, "You sound like a Marv." Mister V even uses this in terms of self-reflection at one point: Am I a Marv? he asks himself, shocked to realize the question is pertinent.

"It's a contentious point," admits Mister V. "You definitely need to be careful around here when you're talking about Marv." He mentions one local artist who wanted to bring in some handmade shirts with a bulldozer pattern, just to capitalize on the story — but that was an unpopular idea for some, and the concept was quashed. "Another group wanted to build a bulldozer float for the Fourth of July parade," Mister V laughs. "And hell, no, that never happened."

Mister V admits that some of the controversy is just "small-town squabbling," and the locals can laugh about it. "But some still carry a lot of trauma around the event, so you have to be careful," he adds.
Still, time makes a difference. Once the personal connections to past events are no longer there, it can become easier for a community to embrace something that at one time was seen as tragic. Mister V mentions the Texas Charlie shooting in Hot Sulphur Springs — an event in which an 1883 troublemaker was gunned down in the street, and is now re-enacted as part of the Hot Sulphur Days celebration. So the Granby library — once housed in the basement of the town hall destroyed on June 4, 2004, and since rebuilt in impressive style at another location — might never be renamed the Heemeyer Library, despite the fact that Marv was the one that made it necessary. "Believe me," Mister V says, "jokes are made about that all the time."

Mister V does want to clear up one misconception. "There is this sentiment out there," he says, "that the people in Granby are ignorant or stingy or any of the terrible things Marv talked about. But Granby is an amazing place to live. Not an easy place, not a perfect place. But the people are so friendly and welcoming, it's sometimes like a goddamn 1950s sitcom. People know each other. People care about each other. People take care of people, and they're in turn taken care of. Anyone who listens to Marv's tapes and thinks that he was right about Granby? About the people here? They don't know what they're missing."

Mister V's Dozer Manifesto is available on both Webtoons and The Duck Webcomics platforms. For more information, follow Mister V here.

This story was originally published on June 4, 2024.