Rob Price
Gutbrain Records
rob + gutbrain.com = email

2018 May 18 • Wednesday

Bill Griffith is best known as the creator of Zippy the Pinhead, whose newspaper strip I used to love reading when I was a teenager. Invisible Ink: My Mother's Secret Love Affair with a Famous Cartoonist is a book-length "graphic memoir" of extraordinary depth and complexity, which deserves a place on the list of the best of such works.

There is a problem with the subtitle, though. The cartoonist in question isn't famous. I had never heard of him or anything he'd done and I'd be more likely than most people to have done so.

While the subtitle is negligible, it does point to a problem with marketing. Everything has to be big and famous to be worth your time, apparently, but one of the fascinating things about this book is its dissection of a placid world, a story about a white, American, middle-class family with a house in Long Island and pretty much everything that's supposed to be included in the American dream.

Like the autobiographical work of Seth or Chester Brown, its power is derived from an unsparing look at the artist's homelife and childhood, but Griffith draws on letters, archives, conversations, published and unpublished writings by the principals and memories to create a mesmerizing mosaic of real people's feelings and behaviors, all of it imbued with mystery as none of it can ever be completely explained.

There will always be questions.

Griffith's use of the comics medium to tell his story, almost as dazzling as Alison Bechdel's deployment of the various tools and techniques of the form in Are You My Mother?, allows readers to float with him spectrally in and our of present and past, dreams and realities, novels and newspapers and letters and comic strips.

There doesn't seem to be any point to providing a synopsis. Obviously his mother has an affair with a cartoonist. It goes on for about sixteen years and while not everything can ever be known, Griffith's explorations amount to an artistic demonstration of Locard's exchange principle: "every contact leaves a trace".

It's easy to read this in one sitting but don't turn the pages too quickly. Even a casual reader of Zippy would surely notice the strength and versatility of Griffith's line, and the visual qualities of this book are stunning.

While I've always been a Griffith fan, I didn't know he had something like this in him or that it would ever come out. I hope he can do more longer works like this.