“Now in my 80s, in my second or third childhood, I’ve come back to the noir influence,” says Jules Feiffer, Pulitzer Prize–winning cartoonist, author, and award-winning screenwriter and playwright, about Kill My Mother, an original graphic novel (Norton/Liveright, Aug.). “Kill My Mother embodies all the things I loved as a kid,” says Feiffer during a phone interview from his home on Long Island.
Described by Norton as a “noir-action-romance,” the book is Feiffer’s tribute to the classic noir, detective, and action adventure movies of the 1930s. Indeed, the book has also reconnected Feiffer to his roots in comics—as a teenager he worked for pioneering comics artists like Will Eisner in the late 1930s.
“When I was nine, 10, 11 years old, I loved newspaper adventure comic strips like Will Eisner’s The Spirit. I loved them and emulated them, but I found that while I could write in the noir mode, I couldn’t draw like that—the moody atmosphere, the cars,” he told PW during an earlier interview. Because of his artistic limitations, Feiffer turned his comics and cartoons—and later plays and screenplays—to social satire.
In Kill My Mother, Feiffer returns to noir. The book starts during WWII and traces the lives of two families over 20 years. The book also features a cast of memorable characters—women in particular—as well as classic stock characters of the noir detective genre, enlivened by Feiffer’s writing and drawing. There’s the drunken, down-at-the-heels PI, a long-suffering but plucky widow and her difficult teenage daughter (she hates her mom), assorted prize fighters and tough guys (complete with half-chewed stogies), and, of course, a beautiful and mysterious woman at the heart of the plot. The book also features what can best be called Feiffer’s “super power”—the ability to write crackling, witty dialogue.
Feiffer originally was planning to get someone else to draw the book, but “everyone wanted me to do it.” Writing Kill My Mother was “somewhere between a play and a screenplay, which are things I have some experience with,” he says. The drawings for Kill My Mother will be different from the spare, unconventional comics without comics panels that ran in the Village Voice for 35 years. “Noir requires action and atmosphere, rain, fog, headlights and shadows against the wall,” Feiffer explains. “It turns us on. You see it in TV, movies, and cable shows. It’s expressionistic and effective, and you need comics panels to do it.”
Feiffer is pleased with the results: “This is as exciting as anything I’ve ever done. I grew up loving this kind of work as a kid and now in my dotage I’m able to go back and imitate it. I seem to have picked up enough drawing skills over the years to get by.”
Today, at 2:30, he is a panelist on a graphic novel panel (see page 10), and tomorrow he signs a new children’s book, Rupert Can Dance, coming from Macmillan, at Table 13 in the Autographing Area.
