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“Most of them don’t know who I am,” said Jules Feiffer of his students at Stony Brook Southampton. “They know I’m famous for something, but they’re not sure what.”
That should change if those students purchase a copy of “Explainers,” a collection of all of the comic strips that Mr. Feiffer wrote and illustrated for The Village Voice from 1956 to ’66. The volume, recently published by Fantagraphics Books, shows the emergence of one of the most original social and political commentators in America at a time when protests for civil rights and against the Vietnam War were beginning to change the country. His career with The Voice, which lasted for more than four decades, would include a Pulitzer Prize in 1986.
The Bronx-born Mr. Feiffer grew up enjoying comics and early on had ambitions of being a cartoonist. He was an assistant to Will Eisner when “The Spirit” strip was attracting attention. But, oddly, it was Mr. Feiffer’s hitch in the Army in the early 1950s that allowed him to evolve as an artist.
“The Army made a satirist out of me because it introduced me to uncontrollable rage,” he recalled. “Actually, I managed to control it because I was scared of my shadow, but without the Army I never would have had access to the anger that had been lurking within since I was a kid but that you can’t show to your parents and to your teachers who mean well. But the Army didn’t mean well. Not to me.”
He continued to write and draw while in the Army, channeling his rage into the work. When he was discharged, Mr. Feiffer made the rounds of the offices of publications in New York, hoping to be taken on as a cartoonist. Editors didn’t “get” his work, which was already out of the mainstream of Eisenhower-era political satire as well as targeting adults, not children. But the reaction was different at The Village Voice, whose founders wanted to reflect and encourage the political activity that was becoming more apparent around the country.
“Without the good fortune of The Voice being there and me picking it out at just the right moment, I’m not sure I would have had a career at all,” Mr. Feiffer said. “I can’t think now or subsequently of any publication that would have given me the same break at an appropriate time when I got out of the Army.
“There was this emergence of Joe McCarthy and the suppression and somnolence that represented those eight years of Eisenhower’s presidency. We’re in the middle of this Cold War presidency and there was no political left in the country. Not one of the people who influenced me most strongly, Murray Kempton in the New York Post and I.F. Stone, ever got on television because they were too outside the pale, and being outside the pale is what I wanted to be. I wanted to emulate these guys.”
Cartooning was a way for Mr. Feiffer to confront controversial issues in a different way. “Nobody was talking about this generation of post-Korean War young people, those in their 20s and 30s,” he said. “Nobody was talking about
sex. Nobody was talking about relationships. Nobody was talking about getting laid because you weren’t allowed to. Civil rights was not on the radar screen yet. And nobody was criticizing the Cold War because that made you an agent of the communist conspiracy.”
A new generation of cartoonists was tackling the tough topics, and newspapers were gradually allowing them the space on the editorial pages to do so. “Herblock was a great cartoonist, but for a while he was also the only one doing what he was doing,” Mr. Feiffer pointed out. “Then a few people began to emerge like Paul Conrad, who was with The Denver Post. Still, when I came along to do what I did, I was virtually alone.”
Mr. Feiffer said that he felt a close affinity to comedians who were becoming more controversial with their material, especially Mort Sahl and the duo of Mike Nichols and Elaine May. “Nobody represented us, so we started talking out of the frustration and we had to get a conversation going and it was that sense out there, people waiting to be talked to, people wanting somebody to sound the way they sounded in private, because they were afraid to talk that way in public,” Mr. Feiffer explained about the comics who were going beyond jokes.
Though a lifelong New Yorker, Mr. Feiffer has been one of the most well-known editorial cartoonists in the U.S. from the 1960s on. Having his strips syndicated certainly helped, but along the way his work has been available in 19 books and has additionally been published in Esquire, Playboy, The Nation, the Los Angeles Times, and (appropriately) The New Yorker.
He has also branched out into other fields. Among his successful stage works is “Little Murders,” which was adapted into a feature film. Nichols directed his screenplay of “Carnal Knowledge,” which starred Jack Nicholson and Art Garfunkel. Mr. Feiffer also wrote the screenplay for “Popeye,” directed by Robert Altman. One of his more popular works is a book for children, “The Phantom Tollbooth.”
And teaching can be found on his resume. He had previously taught at the Yale School of Drama and Northwestern University. When his tenure at The Village Voice ended 10 years ago, he had more time on his hands than he had anticipated. It was an opportune time for Roger Rosenblatt, one of the senior professors in the writing program at what was then Southampton College, to make a phone call.
“Roger mentioned my free time and he could not have been sweeter about it,” Mr. Feiffer remembers. “And I said, ‘Well, when do I start?’ And he said, ‘When do you want to start?’ I said, ‘What do I teach? And he said, ‘Whatever you want to teach.’”
Previously at Northwestern Mr. Feiffer had taught a course called “Humor and Truth” that was designed for undergraduates that “turned out to be a terrific experience,” he said. “And I just built on that and it’s basically Feiffer 101. It’s a workshop and I get them to write an assignment every week and we read it in class. Everybody has an opinion but I’m the professor so I have the most important opinion and the last one. It’s a lot of fun but I make them work.”
Mr. Feiffer has been hard at work too, on a project that does not involve drawing ... other than drawing from memory. For more than three years he worked on a memoir titled “Backing Into Forward,” and, he said, “It’s finally finished, thank God.” It is about how he started out in the cartooning business, and includes the time he spent in the Army. He will be reading from it at Stony Brook Southampton on Wednesday, March 4.
Also much on his mind is the future of political and social cartooning. Interviewed for an article published in The Press in September 2007, Ted Rall of East Hampton, who is now president of the Association of American Editorial Cartoonists, decried the dwindling amount of space given to editorial cartoons and the declining number of cartoonists. There were 200 of them working full-time in the 1980s, and there are fewer than 50 of them making a living today at their drawing boards.
Mr. Feiffer is observing the situation with some alarm. “It’s undeniable and it’s now epidemic proportions,” he stated. “Papers that always had editorial cartoonists have now have eliminated them, and many don’t even bother with the syndicated cartoonists, like Pat Oliphant, who is the best of them by far. They just don’t run anything. It’s kind of interesting the crap papers choose to run, thinking it’s important for their papers as long as it’s print. I mean, it’s interesting that editors traditionally have considered the visual side of the paper beside the point even though photographs and comic strips are, over the years, the most important, but they don’t get it.”
He added: “Editors think what’s important is the stuff they work on. They’re not working on the graphic material, and it steals space from them for the important stuff—which is anything they’re working on, because editors have been known to have egos.”
Probably a few cartoonists and playwrights have egos too. At least in the case of Mr. Feiffer, thinking well of the work he has created using a sharp eye and a pointed sense of humor is more than justified.
Humorist Jules Feiffer will read from his forthcoming memoir during the Wednesday, March 4, Writers Speak program at 7 p.m. at Stony Brook Southampton’s Duke Lecture Hall. Free admission; call 632-5030 for details.
on Feb 24, 2009