{"id":32287,"date":"2025-02-23T09:00:59","date_gmt":"2025-02-23T09:00:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.comicsreview.co.uk\/nowreadthis\/?p=32287"},"modified":"2025-02-21T17:58:11","modified_gmt":"2025-02-21T17:58:11","slug":"kill-my-mother","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.comicsreview.co.uk\/nowreadthis\/2025\/02\/23\/kill-my-mother\/","title":{"rendered":"Kill My Mother"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"
\nBy Jules Feiffer<\/strong> (Liveright\/W.W. Norton)
\nISBN: 978-0-87140-314-8 (HB\/Digital edition)<\/p>\n

This book includes some Discriminatory Content<\/strong> included for comedic and dramatic effect.<\/em><\/p>\n

After years as cartoonist, illustrator, pundit and educator, at age 85 Jules Feiffer returned to his primary role of comics storyteller with an intense, sublimely gripping and innovative graphic novel. Spanning 10 turbulent years, Kill My Mother<\/strong> is a supremely classy, passionately heartfelt tribute to Film Noir, Hollywood Babylon, sexual politics and family secrets, blending trappings of Dashiell Hammett with the tone, pacing and spark of Preston Sturges and Billy Wilder to tell an extended story of love, murder, jealousy and revenge.<\/p>\n

It all begins in \u2018Bay City Blues\u2019<\/em>. It\u2019s 1933 and times are tough all over. At 15-years old, Annie Hannigan<\/em> is cutting up, constantly leading poor, gullible sap Artie<\/em> Folsom<\/em> into trouble, whilst the mother she despises works all hours for dissolute, dipsomaniac, exceedingly cheap private investigator Neil Hammond<\/em>. The odd arrangement developed after the shamus agreed to investigate the murder of Elsie<\/em> Hannigan<\/em>\u2019s husband, whom he constantly refers to as the wrong sort of honest cop. Events take a dark turn when stylish, exceedingly tall maneater Mae Longo<\/em> walks in, offering outrageous sums if the gumshoe can track down a certain someone. The photo she gives Hammond shows a woman remarkably similar to his coolly aloof new client…<\/p>\n

Eddie<\/em> \u201cthe Dancing Master\u201d Longo<\/em> is a rising star of the fight game who usually employs shady but capable gorilla Tiny Tim Gaffney<\/em> to handle the more unsavoury problems in his life but Neil claims to know just how to handle him. In the course of her mean-spirited, casual rebellions, Annie gets poor Artie into real trouble when a shoplifting binge results in pursuit by a store detective far faster than he looks. A very nasty beating is only avoided when an exceptionally tall derelict in an alley lays out the private cop with her carefully concealed baseball bat. The rattled teen takes the tramp back to the dump of an apartment and cleans her up, even as Elsie – very much against her will and better judgement – is dragged by soused-as-ever Neil to the Big Fight to see the Dancing Master.<\/p>\n

The escapade almost costs her everything…
\n\"\"
\nHer drunken boss\u2019 plan to draw his tall target out of the woodwork also involves poor Elsie and leads to a lot of pain, trouble and strife, whilst Hammond, clearly a dipsomaniac with a death wish, starts dogging mysterious client Mae instead of doing the job he was hired for.<\/p>\n

The result is a murder unsolved and unexplained for a decade…<\/p>\n

The concluding half of the story resumes in 1943 with \u2018Hooray for Hollywood\u2019<\/em> as we return to our cast and find them all greatly advanced. Goonish Artie is a Captain of Marines, successfully battling the Japanese in the Green Hell of the Pacific whilst Annie Hannigan is a writer and media darling. Her sensational hit comedy \u201cShut Up, Artie\u201d<\/em> is the most popular radio show in America and is broadcast wherever Yanks are posted. Eddie Longo made the transition to B-Movie star and Ellen, when not babysitting obstreperous grandson Sammy<\/em>, is Executive Vice President of Pinnacle Studios in charge of Image Security and Maintenance. The scary indigent little Annie met in an alley has also cleaned up and moved on. Now she sings torch songs in the Reno Roost as the enigmatic Lady Veil<\/em>…<\/p>\n

Eddy hates his life. The former hard-man boxer is trapped as a song-&-dance hoofer in big, morale-boosting musicals but dreams of major stardom like glamorous He-Man Hugh Patton<\/em> or even an Academy Award… but is typecast and more under the thumb of the formidable Mae than ever.<\/p>\n

The fraught status quo changes after Annie meets the dashing Patton at the Hollywood Canteen<\/em>, but her romantic elation is crushed soon after, when the sponsors call her in to discuss a crisis. A genuine war hero is suing the show, claiming his life is being made a mockery. Unless she can fix things up with her old pal Artie, the show and her career are over…<\/p>\n

Eddie is also near breaking point and Mae calls in thuggish Gaffney as a minder. Events begin to spiral to a shocking conclusion when Longo joins a USO tour to the war-torn Pacific Islands. Patton is going too, and Annie takes the opportunity to join him, as does her mother in the role of \u201cimage maintainer\u201d…<\/p>\n

The first port of call is Tarawa; the hellhole where Captain Arthur Folsom is almost single-handedly repulsing the Jap advance. On the island, Artie is overseeing the building of a stage for the visiting stars whilst marvelling at the stupidity of putting on a show in a battleground still hotly contested by enemy forces. In the air above him, Ellen has a sharp confrontation with Mae Longo and \u201cbodyguard\u201d Gaffney. The events of ten years ago are still painfully fresh in every participant\u2019s mind. By the time all the players debark on the island, a devious and supposedly foolproof plan to commit another perfect murder has been hatched, using the Japanese as ideal scapegoats. However, an intimate killing is far harder than mass slaughter and the scheme soon starts to unravel…<\/p>\n

Complex, beguiling, smartly sophisticated, devastatingly witty and peppered with shockingly casual violence (as every noir thriller must be) this spectacular yarn is packed with twists and surprises, where nobody tells the truth and no one is playing on the side of the angels.<\/p>\n

A masterpiece of cool suspense, mature ingenuity and graphic dexterity, Kill My Mother<\/strong> was winner of the Eisner Prize for Best New Graphic Album, took the National Cartoonist Society Reuben Award for Best Graphic Novel 2014 and was named one of the Best Books of the Year<\/em> by Vanity Fair<\/strong>, Kirkus Reviews<\/strong> and Library Journal<\/strong>. It remains a timeless, hearty slice of bravura storytelling that gets better with every re-reading and a fitting tribute to the talents of one of graphic narrative storytelling\u2019s greatest masters. If you love crime yarns, comic tales, nostalgia and having your intelligence respected, this is the book for you.
\n\u00a9 2014 Liveright Publishing Corporation.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Jules Feiffer (Liveright\/W.W. Norton) ISBN: 978-0-87140-314-8 (HB\/Digital edition) This book includes some Discriminatory Content included for comedic and dramatic effect. After years as cartoonist, illustrator, pundit and educator, at age 85 Jules Feiffer returned to his primary role of comics storyteller with an intense, sublimely gripping and innovative graphic novel. Spanning 10 turbulent years, … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “Kill My Mother”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[75,299,105,225,127,210,93],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-32287","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-crime-comics","category-feminism-sexual-politics","category-mature-reading","category-mystery","category-nostalgia","category-sport","category-war-stories"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4AFj-8oL","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.comicsreview.co.uk\/nowreadthis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32287","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.comicsreview.co.uk\/nowreadthis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.comicsreview.co.uk\/nowreadthis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.comicsreview.co.uk\/nowreadthis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.comicsreview.co.uk\/nowreadthis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=32287"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.comicsreview.co.uk\/nowreadthis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32287\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":32290,"href":"https:\/\/www.comicsreview.co.uk\/nowreadthis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32287\/revisions\/32290"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.comicsreview.co.uk\/nowreadthis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=32287"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.comicsreview.co.uk\/nowreadthis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=32287"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.comicsreview.co.uk\/nowreadthis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=32287"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}