TALKING TO JULES FEIFFER

[MattBrady]

by Michael Lorah

Jules Feiffer, born January 26, 1929, is one of the great influences in comics history. In fact, along with Jerry Robinson, Feiffer is probably the #1 most influential creator whose name isn’t dropped as often as Jack Kirby, Will Eisner or R. Crumb, and his work affects a greater cross-section of humanity than any other comics creator outside of Charles Schulz.

He’s made a name with more work and awards than can readily be listed here, but a few highlights include: the Academy Award-winning short animation Munro, Obie Award-winning play Little Murders, well received novels Harry, The Rat with Women and Ackroyd, children’s books (The Man in the Ceiling, Bark George, I Lost my Bear), screenplays (the acclaimed Carnal Knowledge in 1971, and Robert Altman’s 1980 Popeye), teaching at Yale School of Drama and at Northwestern University, as well as becoming a Senior Fellow at Columbia University’s National Arts Journalism Program, and being elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Oh, and he won the 1986 Pulitzer Prize for Editorial Cartooning for his comic strip Feiffer, which ran in the Village Voice from 1956 to 1997.

Feiffer, working with his longtime comics publisher Fantagraphics, has recently begun a concerted effort to bring the bulk of his material back to print for a new generation of readers.

We asked him about some of the upcoming and recently reprinted books and how they relate to today’s world.

Newsarama: I guess the biggest news is that in March, Fantagraphics is putting out Explainers: 10 Years of Jules Feiffer’s Revolutionary Weekly Strip. This is a collection of your Feiffer strips from the Village Voice, right?

Jules Feiffer: That’s right.

NRAMA: When you started working on Feiffer for the Voice, what was your expectation for the strip?

JF: Well, I didn’t have expectations other than getting it to print. That was my problem: I had been trying to sell my cartoons since I’d gotten out of the army in January 1953, and now we were into mid-September of 1956, and I had not sold a single work that I cared about. I’d done some commercial crap, and not much of that. But in terms of the work that I considered my life’s work, Munro, Passionella, some of the things that I wanted to publish, I had made the rounds of every New York publisher who might possibly be interested, and they liked the work but didn’t want to publish it.

So mainly I wanted to find an audience. My expectations were simply to get it to print, to impress book publishers that there was an audience for my work, and to eventually get these longer cartoon narratives published. It was not at all my ambition to do a six-panel strip. I was introducing myself to the readers as way of getting offers for my cartoon narratives. I’d already done three or four dummies, or rough ones, and taken them around. They entertained editors all over the place, who all rejected me because I was unknown. They didn’t know what to do with the work.

So I thought once I got into print they might think me marketable. And the Voice was on all of their desks, so I knew if I got to that paper, perhaps they would change their minds. And that’s exactly what happened.

In terms of any notion of where I was going with it, or what it would become, the social content I had already been interested in, a satire of my times like that simply wasn’t being done. I had no idea where I was going. Week by week I discovered it.

NRAMA: You refer to the strips in Explainers as a satire of your times, which leads directly to what I wanted to ask next—

JF: This was a period just after the siege of Joe McCarthy, Eisenhower was still President and the mood of the country – particularly among, if you will, the liberal left – was both oppressive and suppressive. People were used to not revealing their politics or their thoughts. People I knew weren’t aware that they had First Amendment rights, because they essentially didn’t - not if they wanted to keep their jobs or get promotions in their jobs.

NRAMA: When I first read some of the strips in Explainers, I admit that I expected them to show some indication of being created forty years ago, but few of them really show their age. You touch on political or topical content, but mostly, the strips are about the social behavior of people. Was that a conscious decision, or were these strips based on actual people and things you saw around you?

JF: I was a young man and had ambitions, so I was on the make, as everyone was. I was on the make for my career, I was on the make sexually, on the make in every possible way that everybody my age was also on the make. I was part of a generation; I identified with that generation, and I was curious about what made us all tick. I was also outraged by the politics of the time, the acquiescence to the oppressiveness of the times and the willingness of people to be censored, or to self-censor. And if you read the mass media or the mainstream magazines like the New Yorker you didn’t seem to notice anything going against the grain. Certainly you never saw it in cartoons, although there were some brilliant cartoonists, but they weren’t touching on the subjects.

NRAMA: As an abstraction, human behavior seems to be one of the few relative constants in history, but did you have any inkling at the time that these strips would be able to hold up so well?

JF: Not much has changed in terms of male/female relations, because the Women’s Movement played significant role and wasn’t in existence when I did those stories. But individual relations between young men and young women, not a hell of a lot is different as far as basic anecdotes. If you read those strips, the sexual strips, or you see the film Carnal Knowledge, it doesn’t date at all because nothing has happened to date it.

And if you look at the political strips, as I started to do, it becomes depressingly clear that in the days of George W. Bush, we are reliving stuff we’ve already gone through. Government does what it did back then in the 50s. It says one thing and means another. It uses language to distort. It uses communication to avoid communication.

NRAMA: I was very taken by the visual style of the strip. You started out assisting Will Eisner on The Spirit, which often had a very cinematic quality. But later-era Will Eisner is more in the style of a play on a stage, where the panels don’t have borders, the characters always appear at a similar depth and same angle. Your strips have a similar “on stage” visual quality. Do you know how did you arrived at this visual style?

JF: Eisner was both theatrical and cinematic, and those Spirit stories that I worked on, some of which I wrote, open, quite a few times, with the character stepping forward and addressing the reader, and telling the story in the first person. Then we’d blend into the cinema part of it where the story was illustrated. So it doesn’t at all surprise me, although I can’t be sure it’s true, that the monologue notion I developed came directly out of my working with Eisner. He was doing that before I worked with him, and I used that device a number of times when I started writing The Spirit.

It wouldn’t surprise me if that’s where I got the idea, but it was clear to me in the beginning that because the message I wanted to convey, whether it was social or political, was so different from what readers were used to that my visual approach could not be cinematic. I couldn’t show angle shots. I had to be as quiet and docile visually as I was being subversive in terms of the story I was telling. I had to kind of lead the reader from one panel to the next, saying that there was nothing here to threaten you.

NRAMA: It works! A recurring theme seems to be becoming the thing that you initially fear or dislike. There’s a strip in Explainers wherein a small man refuses to go outside because he’s afraid of being beaten up, but then he grows more confident (and grows physically throughout the strip), and the joke is that after finally going outside, he feels so good that he beats up the first person he sees.

JF: We were living in a time, and I’m not that sure it’s very different now, when we characterize people one way or the other – the powerless wimp who is a sweet guy and rather ineffectual, or the more aggressive personalities who are more assertive and will take advantage of you. And as I’ve said several times in the past when talking about my work, I was trying to show that The Secret Life of Walter Mitty wasn’t about dreams of grandeur. It was about dreams of power, and that if you gain ultimate power, you will abuse it as much as anyone else.

NRAMA: Looking back at the work now, do you have any strips from the era that you’re particularly proud of, or any that you wish you had another few days to work on?

JF: I don’t think I’ve ever looked at the strips and wanted to re-write. Occasionally, I find that, as I refine my writing, I might change the last panel or cut out a line or two, make it sharper. But there’s not much I’d do different. They work or they don’t work, in their time and in their place.

There’s a lot in the art that I wouldn’t do anymore. I was learning my craft and I was progressing. So if you see those first months of strips you see how the style evolves. That’s not an accident. I was simply searching for a way of presenting myself. I didn’t know how to do it. I knew what I wanted to say; the writing was already developed, but my line had not developed and my visual approach had not developed. I was basically floundering and using different mediums. I went from pen to dowels, which I sharpened because I liked the dry line they gave on the paper, but they took so long to use that I gave that up and moved on to something else. For years, I experimented and was never satisfied. I always wanted to get the freedom that I had in my rough drawings in my finished art. I never thought I succeeded then. It took me about 30-35 years to figure out how to do it.

NRAMA: I think there are few people who are ever truly satisfied with the work they do. I imagine that turning in a new Feiffer strip every week must’ve been difficult at times, especially as you developed some of the longer form strips and other media that you later got involved with.

JF: Well, it actually helped the more I experimented with other strips and other forms. When I started writing plays, the strips got better. I felt that sticking to one medium seemed to limit me, and limit my imagination. When I moved on to other things, it enlivened my wits and everything got better and sharper.

One strip a week is hardly what syndicated strip artists suffer for. When I think about six strips and a Sunday page, I don’t think I ever could’ve done that. One time I tried to get up a series for a strip, but found that after the third or fourth daily strip, I gave it up because I found it boring and oppressive. I thought that this was something I wanted to do all my life, and I actually discovered when trying to put together something myself that I hated it. It wasn’t the work that I hated. I hated the routine and the predictability of putting one thing out after another and being stuck in this kind of grind.

And always, a day or two before, I’d think that I had no ideas and what was I going to do. However, as any professional will tell you, when you have to meet a deadline, you meet it.

NRAMA: You worked with the Voice for 42 years, which sounds like a misprint. That’s a long time. Are you expecting to put out more of the Explainers editions to complete the whole run?

JF: That’s what the plan is. And this book isn’t called The Explainers. The Explainers was a book I put out, a collection of cartoons, back in the early 60s, and I borrowed that title to use on this one. It is simply called Explainers.

NRAMA: After you left the Voice, you created a monthly op-ed piece for The New York Times, the first ever they’d commissioned. Are you able to, or hoping to, collect those strips into a book form?

JF: I didn’t do enough of them. I only worked on it for about two years. I dropped it because I went on to other things. The Times, which had been very free-wheeling in accepting my stuff in the beginning, began to reject ideas that I thought very good. I was not inclined to accept that at this stage. I was too old to have work turned away more than every once in a while, which they began to do regularly, and the editorial tone had obviously shifted against what I was doing. If I were a younger guy and had ambitions in that direction, I would’ve tried to argue my way through it, but by this time I was very involved in writing children’s books, which I love and were being accepted on a huge scale. And I wanted to write some more plays, so I happily gave up The Times. Well, not that happily; I was sorry to lose the exposure, but it was clear that they were not as open to me as they had been. And I had no other outlets [for a cartoon strip]. The New Yorker it was clear had no real interest in my point of view, so there was no real place to go with the strip.

NRAMA: Fantagraphics will also soon be publishing a new edition of your novel Ackroyd.

JF: I’d have to read it first before answering questions and I haven’t had a chance.

NRAMA: I haven’t had the opportunity to read it either, but I did a little research and had a few quick questions if that’s okay. Private Investigator Roger Ackroyd’s obsession with his client Oscar Plante drives this story. What were you looking to convey when you started writing Ackroyd?

JF: At the time, I’d written one novel, Harry, The Rat with Women, which was quite successful but just painful to write. It took me two years, and there wasn’t an ounce of pleasure in that book. I’d decided by the time I finished it that I wouldn’t write another novel, that this was not my gift.

And then I was suffering great frustration trying to get a play called Knock Knock, which I thought was one of my best plays, done. (Note: Knock Knock was eventually nominated for a Tony Award.) I’d gone through three or four, maybe five, producers, and there were always plans to put it on and they were always sabotaged. At one point, we even had production dates; then the producer disappeared into Latin America and she turned out to be a thief. She later, not because of me but because of what she did to investors, ended up in jail. So with all that going on with regard to this play, I couldn’t sit down and start another play. I was angry and bitter about theatre, which I usually adored. I had to do something else.

I thought that if I wrote a novel, this time I’d do it with a theatrical voice – that is, wrote it in the first person and in the character, as if it were a long monologue in a play. Maybe I could get away with it with myself. I would have a better time. I thought of an idea, and that’s what I did, and I did have a better time.

NRAMA: Although you’ve continued to work in non-comics formats, with screenplays, essays and children’s books, Ackroyd was your last proper novel, wasn’t it?

JF: It was a proper novel, yes. Subsequently, I’ve written three novels for children, which is a very different form.

NRAMA: Okay. So you really didn’t feel any affinity for novel writing. I was wondering, because I really enjoyed Harry, The Rat even though you apparently didn’t get much joy from writing it.

JF: Well, I enjoy reading it. It’s not that I hate it, but there are a lot of writers who talk about the pain of writing, and they hate it and what torture it is, and I don’t believe that is a lifestyle to live. I like to have fun, and if I don’t enjoy the work, I stop.

NRAMA: Well, as I said, I really enjoyed Harry, and there were a few things about it that I wanted to ask you: First, I found it interesting that Harry is happiest when he’s completely self-absorbed. It takes 130 pages until he finally realizes that people have thoughts and interests outside of him, and then his life completely falls apart. Why is it so overwhelming to be a concerned human being in a world of narcissism?

JF: The satire is a comment on general therapeutic advice one got in all those self-help books that came out about relating and dealing with others, and communication. And if you looked around, you found that the people who were most successful were the most narcissistic and self-absorbed. They were often the ones who got what they wanted and got their way, pushing the more thoughtful people, the considerate people, the communicative people who’d gone to therapy around. I thought that something quite obvious was not being commented on. My mother had always taught me, “Don’t show off, don’t be so important, don’t be pompous or arrogant,” and I tried not to be. Then you look at the career of Henry Kissinger, and I realized that everything I did was a mistake.

NRAMA: Haha. Do you think that Harry’s class status enabled him to be the lothario that he was? Was that a theme?

JF: His economic class? Well, obviously it had a lot to do with it, but if you have great looks – if you’re a beautiful physically, whether male or female – it’s a kind of union card out of your economic class. This is a society that is ruled by beauty, teenage and early-20 fashion models on the covers of magazines and leading self-destructive lives not unlike Harry. They crash burn in their late 20s or early 30s, and that’s what happens to these people because they don’t know who and what they are. They’re not anybody. They never had a chance to develop. It always occurred to me that because I looked – that I was not Robert Redford, I was forced against my will to develop a personality, develop interest in other people, develop all sorts of interests, which were I this handsome charming guy who automatically got women to run after me, I wouldn’t have maybe had to develop.

NRAMA: Another recent Fantagraphics re-print was Passionella and Other Stories, which again, I expected a little bit to show some of its age, and it really didn’t. For example, in the book’s introduction, it is explained that the four satirists in the short play The Cutting Edgists are based on actual satirists from the 60s.

JF: They’re all commenting on themselves and each other. I was talking about the state of political comedy at the time. People like Mort Sahl and Dick Gregory, I think maybe Lenny Bruce and Shelley Berman.

NRAMA: That’s the one. What I was asking is that despite being based on then timely comedians, I still found the material sufficiently universal that I could honestly hear the voices of modern comedians in each of the roles and completely relevant.

JF: That’s interesting and I thank you for that, but I find that it’s hard to really watch stand-up comedy now because, except a few people like John Stewart, it’s so predictable now. And when it pretends to say something, it’s just shouting, with rare exceptions like Black…

NRAMA: Lewis Black?

JF: Yeah, Lewis Black, who is wonderful, but generally, the assumption is if you say fuck and motherfucker over and over, you’re hilarious. If you talk about your personal problems, you’re even funnier.

NRAMA: Okay. Well, I was actually thinking specifically of John Stewart when I asked, so hopefully there are a few modern comedians who connect to the piece. One of my favorites in Passionella was Harold Swerq, which is basically about the world’s greatest athlete and his desire to pursue file clerking, because file clerking provides him with a challenge. Hitting a baseball doesn’t. I was wondering what inspired the strip?

JF: Harold Swerq came out of my continued interest in how competitive society was and how we saw competition as only positive. I’ve reluctantly had to compete, but I find competition rather unpleasant, and don’t really like it. I was trying to do something that reflected that feeling.

NRAMA: Given the tone of most of your work, generally intellectual and fairly high-brow, I think many readers might be surprised that you authored an ardent defense of superhero and adventure comics, an essay titled The Great Comic Book Heroes. How much of TGCBH was written as a response to Frederick Wertham’s Seduction of the Innocent, because you seem to directly dismiss many of his arguments – before you even bring him up toward the end of the essay.

JF: Not at all. First of all, I never thought of the work at intellectual or high-brow. I thought I was just saying what a writer would say in a cartoon form, and it was considered high-brow because you never saw it in comics. If you saw a similar idea expressed in an essay, it wouldn’t be considered high-brow; it might be considered middle-brow or high-middle-brow, but all I was ever trying to do is to clarify what was going on in society. Explain it to myself and explain it to my readers, and do it in an entertaining way so that I could make a point without being resisted, as I’d found over the years that lecturing people didn’t work. Nobody was going to listen if you told them what they were doing wrong. But if I got through their guard and humored them, they could have insights that might change, alter their method in society for the long run.

There’s no doubt the work was as sophisticated as anything else I was doing at the time when it came out, because those were the things I had to say. And it did recruit a more high-brow and more literary audience, so they then denied that I was doing a comic strip because they couldn’t admit to admiring a comic strip. They had to give it another name. People would tell me how much they loved “those essays” I did, and I would insist they were cartoons, and they’d say “No, no, no no, they’re not cartoons.” Because they couldn’t admire cartoons.

NRAMA: The original edition of TGCBH reprinted several stories featuring each of the heroes discussed in the essay. The newest edition forgoes those comics, stating that because the publishers are issuing Archives and Masterworks and other reprints, the original material is already available.

JF: The Great Comic Book Heroes was the idea of an editor at Dial Press who was then not known for what he is known now: that was E.L. Doctorow. Doctorow came up with the idea, and he couldn’t think of anybody better fit for it than me. He suggested it, and I fell for it. I thought it was a wonderful idea. I would just take a very personal, autobiographical approach to the whole thing, just write about stuff that I liked as a kid, or some things I didn’t like but had observations about. I had a ball, and he was wonderful editor who helped me considerably. Werthem had to come into it, but Wertham was by no means the inspiration.

NRAMA: Do you think that it, in any way, loses some of its power when you don’t have those original strips as a concrete example of what you describe in the essay?

JF: Gary’s [Groth, publisher of Fantagraphics] point was that by now these strips have been reprinted up the wazoo, and there’s no need to do it any more, so I don’t know. I just dipped into the book, and I never really re-read it. I was very happy to see a new edition of it out, and the responses were good in terms of people connecting with a text they’d previously not seen.

[MadMikeyD]

I have the original version of The Great Comic Book Heroes with the reprint comics in it. It's absolutely fantastic. I may have to check out some of his other work.

[Not From Around]

I read The Great Comic Book Heroes many years ago. But all I remember really are the reprinted strips (my first ever look at Golden Age superhero comics) and the more anecdotal parts of the essay. I'll have to read the essay again some time.

Something not mentioned in the article above is that Feiffer also illustrated some noted children's books by others, such as The Phantom Tollbooth. His figure work is remarkably expressive--you can read the expressions even in the thumbnail versions of the strips that go with the article above. Great article!

I think he's being a little simplistic in his contrast between good-looking and/or narcissistic and agressive people who go far and plain-looking and/or passive people who are passed over. There's a lot of truth to that, but I know of many counter examples of ordinary and self-effacing people who made a lot of themselves and good-looking and narcissistic people who never even temporarily amounted to anything.

[Greg Spira]

I remember when I first got my hands on The Great Comic Book Heroes more than 25 years ago. It was my introduction to The Spirit, and to the work of Jack Cole.

I had seen books like DC's Secret Origins before, but nothing like Jules Feiffer's text.

By the way, it's Jon, not John Stewart.

[CoreyB]

Excellent interview.

[vbartilucci]

As I read this interview, the google ad between it and the comments reads, "Learn to draw hands". This is hilarious because that is a major plot point of Feiffer's "The Man in the Ceiling". It is a spectacular piece of work (no surprise) about a creative boy who draws comics. It will sing to you if you seek out a copy.

[wktf]

Originally Posted by MadMikeyD

I have the original version of The Great Comic Book Heroes with the reprint comics in it. It's absolutely fantastic. I may have to check out some of his other work.

I have this one, too. The first edition HC and also the later paperback version. I love this book!

[Dr Tim]

Both "Ackroyd" and "Harry the Rat with Women" are well worth reading, the man's a feckin' genius I tells ye!

[GODDARD]

Feiffer is on Newsarama?



...
wow

i need to start reading Newsarama more

great interview