July 29th, 2008
Jules Feiffer's lines are wavy, but his aim is unerring. As a playwright, screenwriter, and, most famously, as the in-house cartoonist at The Village Voice from 1956 to 1997, Feiffer has turned a piercing, jaundiced eye on half a century of American culture.
After a brief stint apprenticing for the legendary Will Eisner on The Spirit (and eventually ghost-writing a number of strips), in 1951, Feiffer was drafted into the Army, where the radical leftism of his youth was honed into a lifelong antipathy for the hypocrisies of power. In the early years of his strip, first titled Sick, Sick, Sick and later simply Feiffer, he perfected a deceptively simple style: loose, sketchy drawings, floating in a sea of white space, with no background cover for the characters to hide behind.
Revealing themselves through inner monologues, Feiffer's characters, famous and unknown alike, drop the social niceties and expose themselves at their ugliest. Although he hardly spares the powerful, some of Feiffer's greatest wrath is directed at the wishy-washy white liberals of what he eventually called "the radical middle." His scorched-earth take on the gender wars, carried through into his screenplay for 1971's Carnal Knowledge, is no more forgiving.
Feiffer's work has been fitfully anthologized over the years, but Explainers (Fantagraphics) is an unprecedented feast for the Feiffer fan. The first of a planned four volumes collecting all of Feiffer's Voice strips, the handsome 546-page book covers 1956 to 1966. Feiffer, who is currently at work on a musical adaptation of his book The Man In The Ceiling, spoke from his summer home in Martha's Vineyard about Jewish mothers, the Obama campaign, and working with Robert Altman on the 1980 movie Popeye.
The A.V. Club: It's surprising, reading the book, how early the strip's sensibility was formed. Almost right from the beginning, you deal with the themes that preoccupied you for the next 40 years.
Jules Feiffer: Originally, there were going to be a few weeks of introductory strips before I started serializing Munro. When I went to the Voice, I showed them Munro—and maybe Passionella, although I'm not sure I'd written Passionella by then—and something on the bomb called Boom!—what today would be called graphic novellas. They were just long narrative cartoons. They had political content to the extent that they were strongly anti-government, anti- the prevailing political tides of the time. I though what I'd do was break the longer stuff down into weekly installments, but I thought it might be difficult in the beginning for readers to figure out what I was doing and what the hell was going on, so perhaps I should do five or six or seven weeks of introductory strips to tell them who I was and what I was going to do. The introductory strips were still taking over 40 years later. Once I got into the habit and routine of it, I realized what a good format this was for me, and how much better it was than serializing work I'd already done which wasn't designed for that format and would never be ideal for it.
AVC: The visual style, on the other hand, changes visibly from week to week. It isn't until 1958 that we start to see that classic scribbly Feiffer line.
JF: It took a long time.
AVC: Did you have a sense of what you were trying to achieve in terms of the drawing?
JF: You're asking the least qualified person, namely the one who does it. The artwork had very little to do with the thought process, and the writing too, for that matter. What happens, happens, and it happens outside the brain. Over the years, I discovered over and over again that once you lose control, you have a chance of getting good at it. And once you're controlling the work, it's not going to be very good, or it won't be as good as it should be.
I seemed to have instinctually a strong idea of how the strip had to be written from the beginning. That changed too, but it was more in the direction of where it was headed. I didn't have a clue as to the drawing style, because the drawing style that I was groomed on from the beginning was newspaper comic strips, which were much more conventional. The least conventional of all, and the most interesting, was Walt Kelly. I tried to ape a Walt Kelly kind of technique when I did the back page of Eisner's Spirit, a strip called Clifford. But clearly that was in the newspaper comic-strip tradition, and I thought that what I was trying to do here was well outside that tradition, so I started looking elsewhere for people to steal from. I came across George Grosz, and André François, who was a French- Romanian cartoonist, and the rather radical non-New Yorker work of both Saul Steinberg and William Steig. And also UPA, which was doing very experimental animated cartoons at the time: Gerald McBoing-Boing, the nearsighted Mr. Magoo, the Thurber one [The Unicorn In The Garden]. They did just wonderful stuff.
So I was floundering, but I was happily floundering. I felt no sense of crisis. I was in my playpen. Throwing around stuff, and happy as a clam. Each week, it seemed for a while, I was trying something else. Then one day I stumbled upon these wooden dowels and I put them in ink, and they gave me a line for the first time that I liked. What I was desperate for, and it lasted long after the wooden dowels, was to find a way of drawing that was as comfortable as drawing in pencil when I was a kid, and which had a sense of the same immediacy. Immediacy was what was interesting to me, and still is. In all my work, the writing as well, I try to make it look as if it just appeared seamlessly on the page. That it wasn't even crafted. It just happened. That's what I was looking for. Eventually, if it's on your mind, you stumble on it. You need a certain amount of luck and persistence. I can't say it was planned or designed. I just woke up one day and I could do it. But when I could really do it was some 20 years after this book comes out.
AVC: You mean 1980's Tantrum? You've said that was a breakthrough for you.
JF: Tantrum taught me everything. First of all, it taught me not to do any preliminary drawing. Once I was on that track, and I gave myself the confidence of doing a finished [drawing] on good quality paper and not worrying about screwing up—and if I did screw up, I did it all over again—I started to fly.
AVC: You redrew Passionella from scratch, didn't you?
JF: It was Pageant magazine that commissioned it back in the late '50s, and made it a cover story. It got a lot of attention. People loved it and I hated it, because I couldn't stand to look at it. I thought it was so ugly, so badly [drawn]. I couldn't imagine how badly I had fucked up this golden opportunity, except no one but me seemed to notice. When it came time to do the book of Passionella [in 1959], I was certainly not going to let that stuff in print, so I redrew it all. By that time, I knew what I was doing, and it came out the way I wanted. If you take a look at the Passionella collection that Fantagraphics put out last year, it's in there, and I'm very proud of it.
AVC: The format of the Feiffer strip gave you a lot of freedom. You don't draw backgrounds, and the layouts are very fluid. You don't use a grid, or even formal panels, just panel-like areas that can vary in size and shape in the course of a single strip. Was that a style that was around at the time?
JF: No. Eisner would occasionally fool with Spirit stories where he eliminated panels, and other cartoonists would within a regular strip have three in borders and one without one. All the early [Feiffer] strips have a kind of crude border, the first three or four. If you look at it, I was surprised to find this, that I started with borders, I do without borders, I go back to borders. I start with balloons, I leave out balloons, and then I go back to balloons. I had not much of a finished idea of what I was doing. I actually waited for the paper to come out that week to see what it looked like. I didn't know when I did the original what it looked like. So I'd have to see it in print.
Interesting story, in regard to how different it is in print from what you had on your drawing board, is that I had done what may have been the first Jewish mother cartoon, which is in this book, and the first time I did it, I thought, "Oh my God, it looks exactly like my mother. She will kill me." So I had to take that drawing out. I did another one, and it came out in the paper, and it looked exactly like my mother. Now, it didn't look like my mother on my drawing table. The phone rang as soon as the paper came out, and she called up, and I had to lie through my teeth and deny everything.
AVC: Mothers make a number of appearances in the Explainers strips, but fathers don't tend to show up nearly as often. Why is that?
JF: Well, if you came from a Jewish family, you wouldn't have asked this question.
AVC: Was the lack of panel borders a practical decision? Were you more comfortable not chaining yourself to a preset grid?
JF: It wasn't a matter of comfort. It's all about storytelling and staging. This is a dramatic form on paper. Long before I ever thought I'd write plays, I was staging these things so it would be most effective in making my point. I knew what I was saying in many of these strips was complicated and nuanced and unfamiliar to readers of comics, or for that matter, readers of anything in newspapers. So I wanted to bring the reader along in as unchallenging a way as possible, to basically hoodwink readers into looking at this very simple piece of work and thinking "This is gonna be easy stuff," and grabbing them by the throat. It's a pattern I've followed in theater and film, too. If there's something that's important for you to say, you find as entertaining and as unthreatening and as unpolemical and as un-self-righteous a way of saying it as you can.
AVC: People tend to think of you as a political cartoonist, but the political strips in the book tend to be more in the vein of cultural criticism than attacks on specific figures.
JF: I was never interested in the two-party system per se. I was interested in how authority was abused by government, and how lies were told, and rewritten, to seem to be true. I came up out of a tradition of radical journalism. The people I read were I.F. Stone, Murray Kempton. They basically taught me how to think and perceive politically. And I follow it to this day.
AVC: In The Great Comic Book Heroes, you write that you couldn't read Terry And The Pirates at home because your parents considered the Daily News an anti-Semitic paper. But you've also said that they were politically timid, that their "pogrom paranoia" made them afraid to rock the boat.
JF: They were terrified of the outsider status that had been consigned to them, and when that status had lightened and alleviated, they consigned it to themselves, so they never lost it. My older sister was a Communist. I wrote a play about her called A Bad Friend. When she and I would get into a political argument, my mother would go around closing windows. This is in a left-wing neighborhood. But the fear of doing something, saying something that might agitate someone—the New Yorker cover [of Barack Obama] is a perfect example of my mother's sensibility. The people who go around explaining why the New Yorker cover is a bad idea and the harm it can do, you could quote my mother on it. It goes on all day, all across the board. People are afraid, as they were in the 1950s, in McCarthy and post-McCarthy days. I came along just as McCarthy ended. The habits people formed were habits I helped break, but they were still going on strongly at that time. And we're back in them today.
AVC: It's startling to read strips from 50 years ago and realize how relevant some of the political commentary still is.
JF: Rather than feeling flattered by that, I feel somewhat demoralized. When I went into this game, of course I went in to to be successful and famous and emulate my heroes in the business. But I also thought I might be part of some kind of movement that would affect things, and change the dynamic. For 15 minutes, that happened, and then it bounced back to arguably worse than it ever was.
That's what's interesting and exciting about the Obama campaign. Maybe it's just another 15 minutes. People out there think, "Well, maybe something can be shifted." But what I see, unfortunately, is that in the end it's going to be all about race. The whole Muslim bullshit is all about race. Those people who say "I'm worried about him because of the Muslim thing" can't say, "I'm worried about him because he's a black man," so the euphemism is "Muslim." If he's not ahead in the polls in late October by 15 points, he's going to lose. If he's up by 15 points, he might win by three.
- Comments