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Guess I was expecting a little more, so ended up disappointed. There is a large cast of characters, drawn in a loose messy sprawling style. I had trouble telling people apart, especially Annie and her mother Elsie. I agree with another reviewer here, who describes this as farce more than noir.My problem? I picked up volume 3, not realizing it was a trilogy. Got the first two books, started with this one, Volume 1. Now do I really have to read the other two? To complicate matters, volume 2 is a p...
Jules Feiffer has an interesting sense of humor, but when you combine that with a story from years gone by and throw in the noir detective stuff, it is hilarious and kind of kinky. Hard to tell exactly what he is making fun of at all times. Even the dedication may be a little tongue in cheek.
Kill My Mother is a confusing, nonsensical mess. The story takes every noir element imaginable, knots them together into an incomprehensible jumble, and keeps going for 150 pages.Poor character design means that it’s nearly impossible to tell the characters apart, especially the three tall, leggy blonde femme fatales. For most of the book, I had no idea who was doing what to whom, which quickly led to a case of not caring what happened to any of them.One positive thing I will say for the artwork...
A sociopathic teenage girl wants to kill her mother for having the gall to get a job after her father died. A blonde woman hires a private investigator to find and kill another blonde woman. Some other blonde women are homeless, and mute, and do some acting, and work for the aforementioned PI, but I don't know who they are or even how many because they all look alike.I threw in the towel 73 pages in when I picked the book up and realized I had no idea who I was looking at or what was going on.On...
This is actually a difficult one to write a review of. I enjoyed reading it, but I'm not 100% certain I caught all the nuances. We've got multiple time periods, a trio of femme fatales the all kind of look alike, perpetually drunk private investigators, old Hollywood, a whip-smart heroine and her angry-crazy daughter. It begins in the '30's and ends up a decade later during WWII. It's a very involved story and any synopsis I could provide would do a disservice. In fact, there were many points wh...
So you guys know that I don't read too many graphic novels. When I do, they are award winners or something that a friend recommends strongly. My community college library purchased this adult graphic novel based on a review somewhere, but it hasn't been checked out yet. It's been on display, too. The problem? I don't see the teen appeal other than the title. The homage to noir threw me off. I've read a few pulp detective novels, but I was just confused on this one. Feiffer is a great artist--he'...
From the book blurb: Kill My Mother centers on five formidable women from two unrelated families, linked fatefully and fatally by a has-been, hard-drinking private detective. I found this a confusing graphic novel, partly because I simply could not tell the women apart. While I really liked the sketchy artwork, the story was too choppy for my tastes.
Well! This is a doozy. Noir-ish private detectives, alcohol abuse, blackmail, shoplifting, war zones, and lesbianism - what else? I wish there was a tidy Latin word that meant "hating your mom." I would have appreciated it if just one of the female characters with giant doe eyes & similar hairstyles had been a brunette; at some point it got a little difficult to tell one freakishly tall blonde from the next. Other than that, well worth it.
I'm not particularly fond of graphic novels and "Kill my mother" didn't change my opinion. The story is as dizzying as some of Feiffer’s drawings, with numerous and occasionally confusing surprises and contortions, including the killing of a mother in the past. And while the reader feels a certain urgency to understand what the hell is going on, once the various truths and reasons for hatred are revealed it all seems rather absurd and confusing. It’s hard to know what to make of Feiffer’s women
This commits many of the cardinal graphic novel sins that make a bad graphic novel, and yet somehow it was a favorite of 2014 for far too many folks. Number one is that it has no flow to the layout -- it's a comic book written by a picture book illustrator, and feels like such, clunky, too much space taken up by static illustrations. Number two is that OH MY GOODNESS all the characters look the damn same. And honestly, their motives and their personalities are not enough to distinguish them. Not...
It is only out of respect for Feiffer’s past accomplishments that I even give this sloppy graphic novel a “2”. Not only is the meandering plot irritating and confusing, but the drawings are sloppy and in most of the book it is difficult to tell the female characters apart from one another. Making matters worse, the big “reveal” at the end of the book is a real groaner. I know Jules is now in his 90’s and I hate rating this as low as I am, but if you want to read him at his best, I highly advise
The reason this was popular this past year is because Jules Feiffer is the author. Feiffer got his fame from doing children's book and other illustrations, screenplays, plays, so people of a certain age would be interested in his first real graphic novel, a kind of homage to the noir age of Chandler, Hammett, Eisner, Hawks, Huston, etc. And at first glance it's exciting to see, especially if you see his signature drawing style, quick sketchy and airy.. the book jacket says inspired by Steven Can...
Got a limited edition signed by Jules at BEA. Classic noir with plenty of twists, bold B&W drawings (which sometimes makes all the dames slightly confusing in the beginning), funny, sarcastic, biting and all Jules. He says he's working on a sequel to this. If you're into noir and Feiffer, this is your book.
I got an Advanced Reading Copy of the book from the publisher. I have enjoyed Jules Feiffer's work in the past, finding he has a cleverness with wordplay, and a unique world view. My experience, however, has been in his his children's fiction genre, so perhaps I was unprepared for this clearly adult graphic novel. It takes its characters from the 30's into the war years and what characters they are! A girl who resents her mother, a private eye who's the epitome of the noir genre and dies from a
Yeah, it was fine. I don't have as special-of-a-spot in my heart for Feiffer as many of my generation. I've always found his stuff more scrawly and angular than I dig. And noir isn't an aesthetic that I particularly relate to either (though I do like mysteries, as a rule, as well as film industry stories). Ultimately, I had kind of a hard time telling the characters apart, and my mind wandered while reading it.Yay more (famous) people trying the GN form, though! I'll give it an extra star for th...
The jacket flap description claims this is noir, but I would dispute that. It takes some of its inspiration from noir, yes, but so many of the tropes associated with the genre are nonexistent here. I'd say it's more farce than anything. Part of it may be that Jules Feiffer doesn't really have a noir drawing style. You want someone who can really rock the shadows and 30's clothing styles--Frank Miller, Gene Colan, Alex Toth, someone like that ... Feiffer's angst-ridden scratchy linework just does...
Very strange story. Solid 3 stars. Was entertaining, but not super amazing. It has a blurb on the front by Neil Gaiman, but I just found it okay.Kill My Mother, starts off in Bay City 1933. It's a story about a brat of a girl named Annie who hates her mother Elsie. Elsie goes to work for an asshole of a guy named Neil Hammond who used to work with her late husband. Annie resents her mother for never being home. Elsie tries to impress her daughter by trying to find her husband killer. She is alwa...
4 stars for the 1933 section, and 5 stars for the look of the art, but the second half of this book, which takes a 10 year leap in time, takes a narrative swerve that kills the momentum and the believability of the events within. Too bad, because the art is really phenomenal.
Even if you don't know the name, you know Jules Feiffer's art from his decades of editorial cartooning and children's book illustrations, most notably his iconic drawings for "The Phantom Tollbooth." He also wrote the screenplay to Robert Altman's oddball "Popeye" movie, which is a fun bit of trivia. It's a remarkable achievement that Feiffer is still cartooning at such a high level even in his 80's. His artwork is scratchy, distinctive, and as full of life as ever in "Kill My Mother," which is
Such good reviews in places. Neil gaiman liked it...so i really wanted to. I just did not get the appeal. It was all over the place.Flow of pannels was hard to follow and all the female characters were drawn so similarly it got confusing.