It's summertime, and there are just so many books, so many TV shows, so many, well... no, there aren't so many movies. Most of them seem to be aimed at fourteen year olds of all ages.
So what to do? I want something heavy enough to make me think, but breezy enough that it doesn't feel like work.
And then along comes an unexpected surprise: celebrated New York cartoonist, screenwriter and author Jules Feiffer's recent amazing, audacious trilogy of graphic novels KILL MY MOTHER, COUSIN JOSEPH and The GHOST SCRIPT that somehow snuck by me undetected over the last few years.
Taken together, they're like a film noir mini-series, a ball-breaking, heart-wrenching alternative look at America in the 1940s and 50s, full of private eyes, cops good and bad, war heroes, movie stars, gangsters, jitterbuggers, con artists, corrupt politicos, Communists, thugs, drunks, barflies, kids with dreams and adults without any, bouncing from NYC to Hollywood and the Pacific Theatre, theoretically built around the Hannigan clan: a doomed police officer, his frustrated widow, and their pushy, precocious force-of-nature daughter who tears through the series, her ambitions flattening everybody in her way. And it's all illustrated in Feiffer's loosey goosey style, all angst and wild emotion and rubbery layouts, doused with the twitchy, is-it-you-or-is-it-me? neurotic humour Feiffer is known for, and a dark, foreboding sense that all is not right, and may never be; a lingering sense that we're all doomed, if we ignore the past.
It may be odd, but these three glorified comic books are more adult and thoughtful than almost anything playing down at the multiplex in this suburban wasteland, or half the books that have come in over the transom lately. These are Feiffer's first stabs at the graphic novel form, after a long, long career, but they sorta make you wish he hadn't waited until he was in his eighties to give the form a whack.