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KILL MY MOTHER
by Jules Feiffer
Liveright, August 2014
190 pages
$27.95
ISBN: 0871403145


Buy in the UK | Buy in Canada

When I was in primary school, there was a sudden crusade against comic books. For the improvement of our moral and intellectual development, we were required to hand ours over for destruction. I shuffled through my drawerful of comics, fished out two Archies and a Nancy and Sluggo that I could conveniently do without and made my sacrificial offering. But no one was going to get the really good stuff off me.

I wonder what the anti-comic crusaders would have made of KILL MY MOTHER, Jules Feiffer's first but one hopes not last graphic novel. It opens in 1933 ( when, incidentally, Feiffer was four years old), with little Annie Hannigan, a preciously sulky teenager, dancing away with her boyfriend Artie, moaning about her mother who has gone off to work for a private detective. Annie's father, Elsie's husband, "the only honest cop in the history of Prohibition," is dead, dumped in the river by an unknown killer. "I could kill my mother," says Annie, and when Artie objects, utters the phrase that will be a recurrent tag line throughout: "Shut up, Artie."

Elsie is working for Neil Hammond, a revolting specimen of hard-boiled noir private eye with none of the redeeming core of integrity that the genre insisted the type had to possess. Hammond is a sloppy drunk who chases women and at one point winds up sporting a pair of women's underpants. He thinks nothing of sending her out late at night in a dubious neighbourhood to buy some booze. She's menaced by a group of toughs, and in a hilarious scene, seeks refuge in a liquor store run by a communist who refuses to help her on ideological grounds. And so she has to save herself.

KILL MY MOTHER is thoroughly grounded in hard-boiled fiction of the 30s and 40s, but Feiffer persistently subverts its conventions. It is the female characters who take centre stage here, all strong, some terrifying. It is as though the film stars of the period, the Bette Davises, the Joan Crawfords, the Rosalind Russells, were finally allowed to act up to the potential of power they radiated instead of being reined in by the demands of social convention. Their energy snaps in their swirling clothes, their dynamic postures, their size, their sheer presence on the page.

Admittedly, the plot is sometimes hard to follow, but much the same could be said of the ironic and sometimes ambiguous films from which it derives. What does matter is the art, with its swooping perspectives, constant movement, forward drive that impels the reader to turn the page and then stop, almost gasp, at the sheer audacity of the image.

I do think I know what the guardians of my moral development might have made of this book. They would have hated it. It represents everything that they feared in the comics of my childhood, everything that I loved. There is danger here, and challenge, and subversion. Don't miss it if you can help it.

§ Yvonne Klein is a writer, translator, and retired college English professor who lives in Montreal.

Reviewed by Yvonne Klein, October 2014

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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)


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