Invisible Ink: My Mother’s Secret Love Affair with a Famous Cartoonist

By Bill Griffith, published by Fantagraphics.

Hardcover, 208 pages, black and white, 2015.

2016 Eisner Award Winner for Best Writer/Artist! Underground and Zippy the Pinhead cartoonist Bill Griffith uncovers his mother’s hidden past in his first graphic memoir.

This is the renowned cartoonist's first long-form graphic work — a 200-page memoir that poignantly recounts his mother’s secret life, which included an affair with a cartoonist and crime novelist in the 1950s and ’60s. Invisible Ink unfolds like a detective story, alternating between past and present, as Griffith recreates the quotidian habits of suburban Levittown and the professional and cultural life of mid-century Manhattan in the 1950s and ’60s as seen through his mother’s and his own then-teenage eyes. Griffith puts the pieces together and reveals a mother he never knew.