Comics Alternative

While at this year's Small Press Expo, Derek had the opportunity to talk with the great Bill Griffith, whose new book from Fantagraphics, Invisible Ink: My Mother's Secret Love Affair with a Famous Cartoonist, debuted at the event and will soon be available in stores everywhere. As the subtitle suggests, this is a different kind of book for Griffith, a radical departure from his syndicated Zippy strip. Not only is it a deeply personal and moving memoir, but it's his first long-form work in comics. It is a narrative of his mother's sixteen-year love affair with a prolific and recognizable cartoonist of the of the 1950s and 1960s. But even more than that, it's Bill's own story about the discover of his mother's hidden secret -- he learned about the affair in 1972, right after the death of his father -- and his ongoing attempts to undercover the details and understand the dynamics of a family life now long behind him. Indeed, Invisible Ink can be read as a detective narrative, with its autobiographic protagonist