COUSIN JOSEPH

Meet Big Sam Hannigan. Tough, righteous, a man on a mission. The only problem is, it’s the wrong mission.

With the New York Times bestseller Kill My Mother, legendary cartoonist Jules Feiffer began an epic saga of American noir fiction. WithCousin Joseph, Feiffer brings us the next hard-boiled chapter in this highly anticipated graphic trilogy, a culminating event in a storied career. A prequel that introduces us to bare-knuckled Detective Sam Hannigan, head of the Bay City’s Red Squad and patriarch of the Hannigan family featured in Kill My Mother, Cousin Joseph transports us to the Depression year of 1931, revealing the origins of a sordid tale that begins with the elusive Hollywood power broker “Cousin Joseph,” Sam’s mentor and eventual nemesis, and ends with a brutal murder that will forever cement the American myth on the silver screen. With Cousin Joseph, Feiffer builds on his late-life conversion to cinematic noir, bowing, as ever, to his youthful heroes Will Eisner and Milton Caniff, but ultimately creating a masterpiece that illuminates the bipolar nation we’ve become. Jules Feiffer is a cartoonist, playwright, children’s book author and illustrator, and member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He teaches a humor writing class at Stony Brook Southampton College. He lives in East Hampton, New York, where he is completing the Kill My Mother trilogy.