Kudos to Jules Feiffer for creating, writing and illustrating a graphic novel in a fantasy space that he clearly adores. Why the kudos? Who cares that the guy is in his 80s—he tells a helluva story.
Okay, more about Jules before begin. Actually, you get a fair sense of him from his 2008 cartoon for NYC’s Village Voice. I found it on Wikipedia. He won a Pulitzer Prize for political cartooning, was awarded a lifetime achievement award by the Writer’s Guild of America, and he’s got his place in the Comic Book Hall of Fame. And now, he’s got this new book.
It’s called “Kill My Mother,” and I like this description: it’s a “noir-action-romance.” It’s a story dominated by powerful, smart women—a story where men are rather foolish, easily misled, or weak. The plot winds through 1940s Los Angeles, and through a World War II battle zone—it looks and feels like a cross between a graphic novel and a rough storyboard for a post war-time black-and-white film, one that has its doubts about what happened and why. In fact, it’s the sort of noir tale that works best when it makes it way through dark and ambiguous questions. Annie is the protagonist (and the gal on the cover of the book). Her dad is dead. He was a cop. Somebody killed him. She wants to know who did the deed and why. Her mother, well, Annie despises her mother, in Annie’s eyes, a coward of a woman who deserves the worst.
In theory, it’s the book that drives the story, but in practice, here, it’s the pictures. Actually, it’s the whole page, the whole well-designed, elegantly organized duotone watercolors and pen-and-ink that feel so dark, so thick with intrigue. Most of the book is rendered in sepia—not the old tones of photographs, but lively, contrasty, vaguely seedy renditions of what otherwise might have been black. The accent is usually a very pale green, the color of a Hollywood swimming pool on page, a cadaver on the next.
It’s vengeful and bluesy, jivey and filled with songs sung way too late at night by a tall woman with a long past. It’s not jokey—this is serious work by a serious creative pro whose resume is dates back before most of the people who will read this article, or that book. There’s nudity and violence, crude language and tenderness, idiotic situations that feel quite real, and a wonderful sense of place and time.
What works best for me? Just scanning every page, considering the creative decisions that a long life are capable of producing. This isn’t just a good graphic novel. It’s a late stage work by one of our twentieth, and now, twenty-first century masters. I love the way he sets up a page, brings his print characters to life on the page, uses flowing line and dabs of color to fill my head, and feed my imagination. Gosh, he’s good.
Digital Insider 
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