Invisible Ink: My Mother's Love Affair With A Famous Cartoonist, by Bill Griffith
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Invisible Ink: My Mother's Love Affair With A Famous Cartoonist, by Bill Griffith
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Underground and Zippy the Pinhead cartoonist Bill Griffith uncovers his mother’s hidden past in his first graphic memoir.
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. Black & white illustrations throughout Invisible Ink: My Mother's Love Affair With A Famous Cartoonist, by Bill Griffith- Amazon Sales Rank: #564509 in Books
- Published on: 2015-10-03
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 9.80" h x 1.00" w x 7.00" l, .0 pounds
- Binding: Hardcover
- 208 pages
Review “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)“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)“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)“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)“...[An] engaging and poignant tale...” (Mimi Pond (Over Easy) - Tech Times)“[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)“[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)“
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)About the Author 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?" He currently lives in Connecticut with his wife, the cartoonist Diane Noomin.
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Most helpful customer reviews
15 of 15 people found the following review helpful. Do we really know who our parents are? Well written and beautifully drawn By Roberta Most people know Bill Griffith as the creator of the daily comic strip Zippy, but Invisible Ink ("a graphic memoir") is truly a work of art. A very compelling, well-written and skillfully illustrated (as well as painstakingly researched) true account of family secrets uncovered and how lives are changed forever. The story drew me in immediately, and the pages are welcoming to the reader and well drawn, showing a range of skill from very detailed, realistic scenes evoking the time periods they portray, to hilarious send-ups of the gag cartoon style. Bill's Levittown childhood was far from perfect (angry, abusive father), and his mother, as he says, was "no June Cleaver" but when she reveals a 16-year affair with a very well-known popular cartoonist of the day (beginning in 1957), Bill begins to dig up facts and do some research, and soon finds himself in over his head. The story develops as more information is revealed and the drawings are skilled and detailed enough to put the reader right into the unfolding mystery accompanied by countless historical and popular culture references.How well do we really know our family members? Anyone who has sometimes wondered this will appreciate this story, fans of the Zippy comic strip will see what a true artist its creator really is (and learn some painful truths along with him), and anyone who likes a good, engaging story that invites the reader in to the intimate world of the drawn page, will probably, like me, not put it down until they get to its very compelling end….and then start all over again to discover all the wonderful details that went by too quickly the first time.
4 of 5 people found the following review helpful. Great job Bill! By Sally Cruikshank A truly great book which weaves through many periods of time, as it tells the mystery of his suburban mother who lived a very non-conformist life but tried to keep it secret. The book made me wish I'd met her. It evokes the 50's-60's so vividly.Many family details from earlier generations just lead directly to Bill's own interests, the way a talent or obsession can skip a generation and then reappear without the younger person knowing where it came from or why, e.g. sideshows, postcards, artistic talent. His father seems stolid, cruel and spirit sinking, but seems to have been a jolly fellow before the war. Just my opinion, but I think some of these WW2 veterans came back with a lot of anger and hostility which doesn't fit the picture of "The Greatest Generation." The artwork is beautiful. Strongly recommend the book!
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful. A Graphic Memoir of a Mystery Mother By Rob Hardy If you know the work of Bill Griffith, it is probably because you are familiar with his comic Zippy the Pinhead, one of the few survivors of the comix heyday of the early seventies to continue into daily syndication. Zippy might be known for his surreal take on popular culture and his non sequiturs, but Griffith often draws himself into the strip as a voice of cynical reason. Sometimes, given the free-form nature of the strip, there is no Zippy at all, just Griffith’s drawings and reflections about his upbringing and his past. You get the idea that he is trying to make sense of it all. He has now given us a graphic memoir, a full-scale book, to look at his mysterious family. _Invisible Ink: My Mother’s Secret Affair with a Famous Cartoonist_ (Fantagraphics Books) tells family secrets, some painful but some merely secret and now secret no longer. Along the way, Griffith rambles into some big and perplexing questions about art versus commerce, the place of women in American society before feminism, and the irresolvable mysteries of contingencies like what might have happened if he had started to draw Zippy with a specifically commercial purpose.It all starts out with a letter from Griffith’s Uncle Alan who wonders if Griffith might come for a visit and also look through a box of memorabilia and things left by his mother after her death. It all did little to illuminate the life of Griffith’s dad, an uncommunicative and violent man who died in a bicycle accident. For sixteen of the years of her marriage, Griffith’s mother had had an affair with a striving and cultured cartoonist, Lawrence Lariar. She was smart, liked men, and liked to drink; she was as Griffith recalls, “no June Cleaver.” Lariar also published how-to books for aspiring cartoonists. In a poignant and funny series of pages, Griffith imagines what might have happened if Lariar had become his stepfather. Would he have then followed Lariar’s system of drawing a cartoon, which included starting with peanut shapes for heads and for torsos. Griffith then draws himself and Zippy according to the peanut system. They do look a little like the characters in Zippy the Pinhead, but oversimplified and without the careful inking of shade, stipple, and cross-hatch that represents the style we Zippy fans are used to seeing.The pictures on display in this book, of course, all show those details, but they are produced in service of a heartfelt attempt at understanding family members and others who are now long gone. Griffith reflects on all the memorabilia here; he not only had his mother’s box, but also Lariar had unaccountably donated his papers to the University of Syracuse, where a librarian tells Griffith that he is the first one to ask to see them. In one panel here, he depicts himself at his drawing board looking over one of his mother’s albums. The word balloon over his head says, “She once told me the best way to deal with a difficult thing was to put it down on paper.” He has done so, and produced a thoughtful and unique memoir thereby.
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