The Ghost Script: A Graphic Novel
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- € 12,99
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- € 12,99
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Never has the incomparable Jules Feiffer been more eerily prophetic than in this stunning finale to his best-selling Kill My Mother trilogy.
Hollywood is haunted. 1953. Ghosts abound. In particular, the ghost of Detective Sam Hannigan—murdered in Bay City twenty-two years earlier by Addie Perl, the hired assassin who then bought a Hollywood nightclub with her blood money. Among the nightclub’s favored clientele is Sam’s widow, Elsie. Blinded by a Japanese bullet while on a USO tour in the South Pacific, Elsie has been reinvented into “Miss Know-It-All,” a Hollywood gossip columnist. But blind Elsie is haunted by the ghost of her husband, Sam, who asks her accusingly: “If Miss Know-It-All knows so much, why can’t she find Cousin Joseph, the man who had me killed?”
Hollywood is haunted. Spooks abound. Agents Shoen and Kline, investigators for the House Un-American Activities Committee, manipulate the blacklisted, buxom, over-the-hill starlet-turned-hooker Lola Burns into working for them and naming the names she had once refused to betray.
Hollywood is haunted. Communist screenwriters Oz McCay and Faye Bloom are noisily plotting, boozing, and laughing their way toward their impending disaster.
Hollywood is haunted. As an inside joke, writer-director Annie Hannigan—Sam and Elsie’s daughter—comes up with the idea of a “Ghost Script” that may or may not exist but is rumored to expose the inside story of the Hollywood blacklist and the names of its undercover masterminds, most notably the reclusive philanthropist Lyman Murchison, a superpatriot with a dirty secret.
Hollywood is haunted. Stumbling his way through this maze is private eye Archie Goldman, a tough-talking, nebbishy good guy who’s never been in a fight he didn’t lose. Archie’s single aim is to live up to the memory of the ghost who haunts him: Detective Sam Hannigan. Trail along with Archie into the middle of this muddle, as he tracks the arc of history and finds that it has rounded itself off into a circular firing squad.
In this antic and brilliant assault on our past and present, Jules Feiffer shows us, once and for all, that if there’s one thing Americans hate, it’s learning from past mistakes. Every twenty years or so, a new generation must address new biases and injustices that are virtually identical to past biases and injustices. But who remembers? Exposing the tragically cyclical path of American history, Jules Feiffer pens the final installment to a noir masterpiece.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Feiffer concludes the remarkable trilogy that began with Kill My Mother and Cousin Joseph, inspired by the tropes of film noir and the historical reality of anticommunist witch hunts, in this feverish crime story. In 1950s Hollywood, everyone is talking about the legendary "Ghost Script," a screenplay rumored to be floating around L.A. that supposedly reveals a real-world conspiracy behind the Hollywood blacklist. Some blacklisted screenwriters decide to turn the legend into reality, adding another maddening level to the confusion between truth and fiction that runs through the plot. Soon an expansive cast of characters is chasing the script, eager to either expose the red baiters or cover them up. Poor gumshoe Archie Goldman, nominally the protagonist, gets hired by interested parties on both sides but is barely able to keep up with the twists and turns. Feiffer has been drawing comics since before the era in which the book is set (one character mentions growing up reading The Spirit, which Feiffer worked on in the 1940s) and he shows off his mastery of the form with grace. The plot loops so often that it's easy to lose threads, but the atmosphere of paranoia, censorship, and enforced patriotism thrums. Unsurprisingly for Feiffer, the strongest sections are the portraits of individual characters, squirming and dancing out their preoccupations. In this capstone to a graceful three-volume performance, Feiffer has an utterly unique take on crime fiction and crime comics, drawing with an energy that practically hurls the characters off the page.