Jules Feiffer’s “Kill My Mother”

When we found out that the Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist Jules Feiffer was going to be publishing his first noir graphic novel next summer, we asked him to let us see a few pages.

“The book is called ‘Kill My Mother,’ which, I assure you, has nothing to do with autobiography,” Feiffer says. “It goes back to my early years, when I was an addict of hard-boiled crime fiction and newspaper adventure strips. If you were a child of the Great Depression, as I was, your preference was to fantasize elaborate escapes, because they were much more attractive than real life; my forms of escape allowed me to survive my real life.

“As I aged into my eighties, I found that my interests in the long form, which over the preceding forty years had been largely taken up with theatre and film, shifted back to what I loved most as a kid: the classic adventure strips exemplified by Will Eisner’s ‘The Spirit’ and Milton Caniff’s ‘Terry and the Pirates.’ Both strips offered role models and crucial learning experiences.

“I worked for Eisner from when I was about fifteen or sixteen, around 1946, on and off until 1951. Toward the end, I was ghostwriting ‘The Spirit.’ Eisner found me useless as an artist, but he liked the way I wrote. He was by far the most original and inspirational comics creator of his time. And, for me, it was painfully frustrating that, no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t learn to draw in noir style. It only took me sixty additional years to figure out how.

“Working in the noir form for the first time, I began fooling with a story line, not really knowing where I was going, leaving behind the sketchy line drawings I had become known for and the satiric political and social ideas that made up my subject matter for over forty years. Instead, I began to experiment with the sort of work I loved and read as a teen-ager: not only Eisner and Caniff but the private-eye guys Hammett and Chandler, along with such noir movies as ‘The Maltese Falcon,’ ‘The Big Sleep,’ ‘Double Indemnity,’ and ‘Mildred Pierce.’ I tried to write and draw in celebration of the works that meant so much to me as a young man, areas that I had steadfastly avoided up till now because I didn’t think I was the right artist to draw the story I wanted to tell.

“The following selection will introduce to the reader a style of storytelling and illustration that neither I nor my readers have ever seen me work in before. The short selection is meant as an appetizer. The book itself is a hundred and fifty pages of thrills and chills, taut and tortured characters and, here and there, I admit, pretty funny.”

“Kill My Mother” will be published by W. W. Norton, in August. Click the images below to expand.