INVISIBLE INK: MY MOTHER’S LOVE AFFAIR WITH A FAMOUS CARTOONIST by Bill Griffith (review)

Review by Lily Fierro

All families have a level of dysfunction to them, and notable underground cartoonist and Zippy The Pinhead creator Bill Griffith’s family certainly is not an exception.

His most personal and straightforward work, Invisible Ink tracks Griffith’s own discourse on understanding his late mother’s 16 year second life as the mistress of the minor cartoonist Lawrence Lariar (what an alliteration for a name!) through her pseudo-fictional book about her life and her diary entries.

Griffith’s family origins in America are hardly humble.

As descendants of the legendary explorer, Civil War veteran, painter, and photographer William Henry Jackson, a distant relative of the man who created Uncle Sam and a man whose legacy stands so high in American history that he has a mountain peak in Yellowstone named after him, generations of Griffith’s family have struggled to rise up to the pioneering success of their leading patriarch and, as a result, have languished in William Henry Jackson’s shadow.

Opening up with Griffith’s travels to North Carolina to visit his uncle Al, his mother’s younger and definitely far more sensible brother, to dig through a box of memorabilia of WHJ (the affectionate acronym used throughout the novel to refer to the flagship of the family), the looming presence of the great WHJ remains in the lives of his descendants and throughout the plot of Invisible Ink.

As a result of the mighty accomplishments of WHJ, a latent inferiority complex weaves in and out the lives of many of the Jackson children, especially Griffith’s mother, Barbara M. Jackson. As the child of Clarence Jackson (WHJ’s son) and Ethel DeMott, a couple whose desires for fun in their own lives far surpassed their parental responsibilities, Barbara began her life with an unconventional understanding of family. Raised mostly by her Aunt Gladys, a family friend, Barbara could have taken her life could have in two directions: toward domesticity and normalcy or toward uncharted, individual territory.

But, alas, she did not choose one or the other; Barbara chose both. She married James Griffith and had children, spending her early adult life as a homemaker and dutiful army wife, much to the dissatisfaction of her own intellectual desires to devour and create art and to live as an independent woman. However, as her husband’s military career sent him out of the country, Barbara’s own hunger for autonomy rose, and she began working as a secretary, marking the beginning of her wandering eye, as Griffith recounts the men his mother flirted regularly with (and perhaps more than that) as his father served in Korea, and her attempt to feed her intellectual thirst with the creation of her monthly writing group in suburban Levittown.

Upon Griffith’s father’s return home and eventual demotion due to a surplus of officers in the army, life in the Griffith home took a turn away from that of the idyllic all-American family. The stoic, repressed James brought his work struggles home in the form of a live wire temper, alienating his children and his wife. And, to help with finances, Barbara accepted a job as a part-time, on-call secretary with Lawrence Lariar, which developed into a nearly two decade affair.

Treading uncomfortable territory, Griffith weaves his mother’s life events, checkpoints in Lariar’s career, and his mother’s book and diary writings to attempt to understand her motivations behind the inception of the affair and its continuation. And after some rumination, he wonders what his own life and work would have been like if Lariar had been his stepfather.

With the intertwining stories and Griffith’s investigation poured onto the pages and open for your own interpretation, Invisible Ink most interestingly develops into a comparison of Griffith’s own career as an alternative cartoonist against Lariar’s commercially aimed trajectory, which influenced his mother’s writing to be directed toward the same goal.

Griffith, in embracing the absurd, found his own voice, characters, and success as a cartoonist, gaining fame because of a unique perspective rather than creating works in order to gain popularity, making him one of the first in the Jackson family line to step out and away from WHJ’s shadow. 

From a pure execution perspective, I cannot say a bad word about Invisible Ink; the ability of Griffith to create an undercurrent in his mother’s story that introspectively reviews of his own career without ever praising himself or really delving too far into his own work demands respect.

But, I must admit that I had great difficulty getting to this fascinating latent message because I fundamentally could not empathize with the story of Barbara M. Jackson. I understand that women had far fewer choices to gain independence in 1950s and 1960s America, and I understand that her parents clearly did not prepare her for success in her familial life.

In Invisible Ink, what readily becomes apparent in the Jackson family line is that many of the members had their own ambitions for success and fame, but they all had some urge to meet societal demands and expectations of having a family, so they had offspring even though nurturing and supporting them did not stand as a high priority. It is this selfishness in having a family only to convey a semblance of normalcy and committing more time, effort and passion to other ambitions without the considering the family one created that I find completely reprehensible and difficult to empathize and even sympathize with (at least in my eyes as a first generation American who is not a descendant of a major historical figure).

Regardless of your perspective, give Invisible Ink a look, and see what the lives of Barbara Jackson and Lawrence Lariar draw from you. You’ll learn something about yourself in your response to the novel, and perhaps that response will help you understand your own priorities: my reaction to Invisible Ink certainly reconfirmed mine.