With the New York Times bestseller Kill My Mother, legendary
cartoonist Jules Feiffer began an epic saga of American noir fiction.
With Cousin Joseph, a prequel that introduces us to bare-knuckled
Detective Sam Hannigan, head of the Bay City's Red Squad and patriarch
of the Hannigan family featured in Kill My Mother, Feiffer brings us
the second installment in this highly anticipated graphic trilogy.
Our story opens in Bay City in 1931 in the midst of the Great
Depression. Big Sam sees himself as a righteous, truth-seeking patriot,
defending the American way, as his Irish immigrant father would have
wanted, against a rising tide of left-wing unionism, strikes, and
disruption that plague his home town. At the same time he makes monthly,
secret overnight trips on behalf of Cousin Joseph, a mysterious man on
the phone he has never laid eyes on, to pay off Hollywood producers to
ensure that they will film only upbeat films that idealize a mythic
America: no warts, no injustice uncorrected, only happy endings.
But Sam, himself, is not in for a happy ending, as step by step the
secret of his unseen mentor's duplicity is revealed to him. Fast-moving
action, violence, and murder in the noir style of pulps and forties
films are melded in the satiric, sociopolitical Feifferian style to dig
up the buried fearmongering of the past and expose how closely it
matches the headlines, happenings, and violence of today.
With Cousin Joseph, Feiffer builds on his late-life conversion to
cinematic noir, bowing, as ever, to youthful heroes Will Eisner and
Milton Caniff, but ultimately creating a masterpiece that through his
unique perspective and comic-strip noir style illuminates the very
origins of Hollywood and its role in creating the bipolar nation we've
become.
