Adding to a legendary career that includes a Pulitzer Prize, an Academy
Award, Obie Awards, and Lifetime Achievement Awards from the National
Cartoonist Society and the Writers Guild of America, Jules Feiffer now
presents his first noir graphic novel. Kill My Mother is a loving
homage to the pulp-inspired films and comic strips of his youth.
Channeling Eisner's The Spirit, along with the likes of Hammett,
Chandler, Cain, John Huston, and Billy Wilder, and spiced with the deft
humor for which Feiffer is renowned, Kill My Mother centers on five
formidable women from two unrelated families, linked fatefully and
fatally by a has-been, hard-drinking private detective.
As our story begins, we meet Annie Hannigan, an out-of-control teenager,
jitterbugging in the 1930s. Annie dreams of offing her mother, Elsie,
whom she blames for abandoning her for a job soon after her husband, a
cop, is shot and killed. Now, employed by her husband's best friend--an
over-the-hill and perpetually soused private eye--Elsie finds herself
covering up his missteps as she is drawn into a case of a mysterious
client, who leads her into a decade-long drama of deception and dual
identities sprawling from the Depression era to World War II Hollywood
and the jungles of the South Pacific.
Along with three femme fatales, an obsessed daughter, and a loner
heroine, Kill My Mother features a fighter turned tap dancer, a
small-time thug who dreams of being a hit man, a name-dropping cab
driver, a communist liquor store owner, and a hunky movie star with a
mind-boggling secret. Culminating in a U.S.O. tour on a war-torn Pacific
island, this disparate band of old enemies congregate to settle scores.
In a drawing style derived from Steve Canyon and The Spirit, Feiffer
combines his long-honed skills as cartoonist, playwright, and
screenwriter to draw us into this seductively menacing world where
streets are black with soot and rain, and base motives and betrayal are
served on the rocks in bars unsafe to enter. Bluesy, fast-moving, and
funny, Kill My Mother is a trip to Hammett-Chandler-Cain Land: a
noir-graphic novel like the movies they don't make anymore.
