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Invisible Ink: My Mother's Love Affair with a Famous Cartoonist
This is the renowned cartoonist's first long-form graphic work -- a 200-page memoir that poignantly recounts his mother's secret life, which included an affair with a cartoonist and crime novelist in the 1950s and '60s. Invisible Ink unfolds like a detective story, alternating between past and present, as Griffith recreates the quotidian habits of suburban Levittown and the professional and cultural life of mid-century Manhattan in the 1950s and '60s as seen through his mother's and his own then-teenage eyes. Griffith puts the pieces together and reveals a mother he never knew.
Book Details
- Publisher: Fantagraphics Books
- Publish Date: Oct 3rd, 2015
- Pages: 208
- Language: English
- Edition: undefined - undefined
- Dimensions: 9.50in - 6.80in - 1.00in - 1.55lb
- EAN: 9781606998953
- Recommended age: 16-UP
- Categories: • Nonfiction - General• Literary
About the Author
Griffith, Bill: - Bill Griffith is the artist behind the legendary weekly comic Zippy. Griffith's prolific output has been included in such publications as the Village Voice, National Lampoon, and the New Yorker. Along with Art Spiegelman, Griffith co-founded the influential anthology Arcade and is credited for coining the popular phrase, "Are we Having Fun Yet?" In 1980, he married cartoonist Diane Noomin. He currently lives in Connecticut.
Praise for this book
Starred Review: [Griffith's] intricate drawing style, which exploits a range of backdrops, from blank to near-photorealistic depictions of architecture, complements the richness of hisverbal narration and the veracity and particularity of the dialogue he creates for the many relatives andfamily friends he portrays ... [A]bsorbing and moving.--Ray Olson "Booklist"
This autobiographical story by the creator of Zippy the Pinhead will ring true to anyone who has ever watched their parents' marital misery around the dinner table and wondered what was really going on. ... Weaving a tapestry of family dysfunction and clandestine liaisons set against the backdrop of the 1950s and '60s, Griffith's... archaeology of his family's past is an evocative portrait of postwar America.-- "Publishers Weekly"
[Invisible Ink] is an elegant, serious, well-crafted book from an artist who works with a kind of serious fury that's kept him going for years and years now.--Tom Spurgeon "The Comics Reporter"
Already a pioneer of underground comix, and perhaps the last great daily comic strip artist (his Zippy the Pinhead carries giddily on), Bill Griffith now earns yet another distinction, as memoirist. Invisible Ink is a dense, digressive personal essay that tries to understand the fading world of his parents - especially his mother, an irrepressible and adventurous soul ... [W]ith his meticulous, etching-like drawings and conversational tone, Bill Griffith imagines his mother's ambitions and passions with empathy and stirring respect.--Sean Rogers "The Globe and Mail"
...[An] engaging and poignant tale...--Mimi Pond (Over Easy) "Tech Times"
[Invisible Ink] might be Griffith's best work to date, an emotional, intimate, and almost startlingly sympathetic look at the secrets we hide from our family and how we often fail to see our parents as fully rounded people, ultimately to our own detriment.--Chris Mautner "The Comics Journal"
There's an edginess and intelligence to this work that reaches back to the best of America's underground comix, a movement from which Griffith emerged in the 1970s. ... It's the best work so far by an artist who has given us decades of superlative work.--Paul Tumey "The Comics Journal"
What makes this story extraordinary is that Bill Griffith has definitely met his match with his mother who gives his storytelling skills a run for their money. If truth is stranger than fiction, then this must be one hell of an example of that. It boggled the mind of Bill Griffith, one of the great mind-bogglers in comics.
--Henry Chamberlain "Comics Grinder"Employing a jauntily crosshatched style, Griffith zigzags through recollections of a Long Island youth and a postwar mom conflicted enough to beam over her son's success in underground comics... but to refuse to show his work to her friends for 'fear that people may say to me, "Your son draws dirty pictures."' Here, when Griffith draws his mother having sex with her illicit lover, the pictures are not dirty; they're heartbreaking.--R.C. Baker "The Village Voice"