Jules Feiffer goes long(form)

Over at the New Yorker book blog Page-Turner, Jules Feiffer previews three chapters of his graphic novel “Kill My Mother,� due out in August.

The title, he tells Mina Kaneko and Francoise Mouly, “has nothing to do with autobiography. … It goes back to my early years, when I was an addict of hard-boiled crime fiction and newspaper adventure strips. If you were a child of the Great Depression, as I was, your preference was to fantasize elaborate escapes, because they were much more attractive than real life; my forms of escape allowed me to survive my real life.�

Feiffer, of course, has long been one of our most interesting and iconoclastic talents -- a comics artist, novelist and playwright. His strip “Feiffer� ran in the Village Voice for more than four decades and he collaborated with Norman Juster on the 1961 children’s classic “The Phantom Tollbooth.� (A second collaboration, “The Odious Ogre,� was published in 2010.) His vision is edgy but accessible: pointed, political, engaged.

“Kill My Mother� is, as he suggests, a throwback, a 1930s-era noir inspired by Milton Caniff and Will Eisner.

“I worked for Eisner,� Feiffer remembers, “from when I was about 15 or 16, around 1946, on and off until 1951. Toward the end, I was ghostwriting ‘The Spirit.’ Eisner found me useless as an artist, but he liked the way I wrote. He was by far the most original and inspirational comics creator of his time. And, for me, it was painfully frustrating that, no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t learn to draw in noir style. It only took me 60 additional years to figure out how.�

As for what noir style is -- and how it differs from the rest of Feiffer’s work -- it’s hard to say. The drawings are impressionistic, but then, that has always been true of Feiffer’s art.

In the chapters posted at Page-Turner, images careen and tumble, breaking out of panel format; a boxing match is presented, across two-plus pages, as a kind of choreographed folie à deux, while a trio of tough guys (street urchins, or worse) appear almost as a single entity: hydra-headed, multi-limbed.

We can see the influence of Eisner in the way the city is represented -- rows of tenements in the background like a set. Indeed, the feeling is similar to that of Eisner’s early, groundbreaking graphic novel “A Contract with God,� which also takes place in an urban wilderness and traces a cacophony of overlapping lives.

As for the larger plot of “Kill My Mother,� the three chapters don’t reveal all that much. Yet Feiffer, who turned 85 in January, considers it more an homage than a summing up.

“I began to experiment,� he explains, “with the sort of work I loved and read as a teenager: not only Eisner and Caniff but the private-eye guys Hammett and Chandler, along with such noir movies as ‘The Maltese Falcon,’ ‘The Big Sleep,’ ‘Double Indemnity,’ and ‘Mildred Pierce.’ I tried to write and draw in celebration of the works that meant so much to me as a young man.�

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