“The book is about my parents’ marriage and all their secrets, which were kept from me and my sister as we were growing up,” the cartoonist Bill Griffith says. Most commonly known for “Zippy the Pinhead” (the daily comic strip that he started, in 1970, and which is syndicated in hundreds of newspapers nationwide), Griffith has just released a graphic memoir, “Invisible Ink: My Mother’s Love Affair with a Famous Cartoonist.” We spoke to him recently about the book.

“It’s the story of my mother’s long, sixteen-year secret affair with a cartoonist who was famous in his day but is now almost utterly forgotten,” Griffith says. “His name was Lawrence Lariar. He was a gag cartoonist, primarily, but he dabbled in almost every field of comics, from the nineteen-twenties to the nineteen-sixties. And, in this book, I kind of take on the aspect of a detective, trying to understand who this man was, and what influence he had on me as almost a kind of shadow father._ _

Did Lariar ever have any connection with The New Yorker?

He tried [laughs], but failed. I think The New Yorker was possibly the only magazine he did not appear in.

To act as a detective to try to find the man that your mother is sleeping with—that sounds like the plot of a piece of pulp fiction. What gave you the inspiration for this?

Well, the book was inspired by a visit I made to my uncle, who is the only family member of that generation still alive. He’s ninety-one years old, and he lives in Winston Salem, North Carolina, and on a visit to him three years ago or so, the subject of my mother’s possible affairs came up. My mother had several affairs, and my aunt asked me if I knew if my mother had an affair with my next-door neighbor, growing up in Levittown, and I said no, I think that was probably too dangerous. But then, of course, there was Lariar, and they asked me who that was—they had no idea. When I thought about it later that night, it just kept spinning around in my head; I started Googling Lariar. I hadn’t really given him any thought since my mother actually first confessed the affair to me very briefly, in 1972, after my father’s death (which did not prompt me to ask any questions about it whatsoever, much to my regret now). But, anyway, here I am, three years ago: I’m Googling Lariar, and hundreds of images come up. The guy was an incredibly prolific cartoonist and, within an hour or so of that, I realized I had a graphic novel. I had a graphic memoir in my head—something I’d been waiting to happen for twenty or thirty years. I always thought, Someday I’ll do a graphic novel; what will it be? And here it was. It was handed to me.

Do you think that’s because there were so many images? If your mom had had an affair with a carpenter, for example, would it have prompted you in the same way?

No, it wouldn’t. My mother’s affair with Lariar brought high culture into our house. Even though he himself was a kind of lowbrow cartoonist, as a person, he was an intellectual. And my mother was as well, but not in a fully developed way. She was mostly interested in writing and in music. But, through Lariar, she brought into our house art in all its forms, and cartooning! All of his books started to appear in the house. He wrote three “How to Draw Cartoons” books; he edited dozens of other books on cartoons. My mother took on the job of editing his “Best Cartoons of the Year” book one year, which meant I came home from school one day when I was thirteen years old and saw hundreds of original gag cartoons all over the floor in our living room. So cartooning entered my house and entered me through my mother through Lariar, without my being fully aware of it.

Do you have some sense of how your father dealt with the affair?

My mother said she had four good years of my father, and that was it. The first four years of their marriage, so in the nineteen-forties. And from then on it was a kind of truce, an agreement they would not get divorced—she also left me an unpublished novel in which she goes into great detail about her marriage, written with pseudonyms, but all clearly recognizable people that I know. In it, she says she couldn’t imagine divorcing, because she would have been the first divorcée in her family, and it would be a shameful thing. This was in the nineteen-fifties, the “Leave It to Beaver” era, when divorce was not all that common. So they had a kind of truce. Did my father know about these affairs? How could he not have known about a sixteen-year affair? The other ones—there were others—he was away, so no, I don’t think he knew about those. My father was a very buttoned-up person, very repressed. Even if he knew about these things, I don’t think he would bring them out into conversation.

And when you say you knew you had a graphic memoir, what about this revelation felt like it was perfectly suited for comics? Was it that Lariar was a cartoonist himself?

Well, that certainly added a tremendous graphic element in my book, to be able to talk about and then to redraw and show the comic art of this man who is my kind of shadow father, who was exerting this influence over me through my mother. For years I had been thinking, Where is my graphic novel? Where is my graphic memoir? I’d been ruminating about it for decades, wondering if it would ever pop into my head. I had half a dozen ideas that never went anywhere, but this one seemed like it came right out of my gut, right out of my insides, that it had to happen. It seemed perfectly well-suited, because I was dealing with a man who, in an almost Zelig-like way, embodied the history of comics in America. He contributed stories to the very first comic books, in 1934, pre-“Superman.” He was there at every point in the history of comics in America, from the twenties to the sixties, so through him I could relive the history of comics as well.

Here is an excerpt of Griffith’s memoir: