Cartoons For Grown-Ups

Cartoons for Grown-Ups

By DAVID KAMP
Published: October 17, 2008
At this point, there’s an entire generation of parents and kids who know Jules Feiffer solely as a children’s book author, the man behind the charming bedtime standbys “Bark, George” and “By the Side of the Road.” It’s been eight years since he stopped doing his weekly syndicated comic strip for grown-ups, which was simply called “Feiffer,” and 37 years since Mike Nichols filmed Feif fer’s screenplay “Carnal Knowledge,” an acutely adult-oriented examination of sexual desire, virginity loss, infidelity, divorce and other subjects that never come up in “Bark, George.” So the new anthology “Explainers,” which gathers all of Feiffer’s Village Voice strips from 1956 to 1966, is a welcome reintroduction — or introduction, for the uninitiated — to a great cartoonist who boldly bent his medium to adult purposes long before it was commonplace to do so. As squat and dense as a loaf of spelt bread, this book reproduces the first decade of “Feiffer” in its entirety, and therefore captures in minute detail the birth and development of a whole new approach to cartooning.


EXPLAINERS
Written and illustrated by Jules Feiffer
546 pp. Fantagraphics Books. $28.99
Multimedia

Certainly the young Garry Trudeau and Berkeley Breathed were paying attention. The strips collected in “Explainers” anticipate “Doonesbury” in their unapologetic text-heaviness and political content, and “Bloom County” in the characters’ frazzled, pixilated facial expressions and the cartoonist’s agitated, slightly forward-pitched lettering. (Lettering is the most underrated of cartoonist’s skills; Feiffer is an ace.) You also detect portents of Art Spiegelman, Mark Alan Stamaty and the entire graphic-­novel genre. It’s no exaggeration to say that Feif fer opened up the full range of possibilities of what a comic strip could be.

Yet in 1956, Feiffer was a 27-year-old who couldn’t get arrested in the business. This was attributable as much to his own obstinacy as to any prevailing trends. He didn’t have it in him to be a family-friendly gag man like Hank “Dennis the Menace” Ketcham or a concocter of super hero adventures for DC Comics. The New Yorker’s wry panel cartoons were a closer match to Feiffer’s ethos, but still too pat and limiting. Feiffer aspired to nothing less than book-length narratives, satirical and topical, and for this ambition, he was rewarded with a pile of rejection letters.

In his introduction to “Explainers,” Gary Groth, the book’s editor and one of its publishers, elicits a revealing comment from Feiffer about his plight at that time. “It was a Catch-22 situation,” the cartoonist says. “I had no name, so who was going to buy this work that looked like children’s drawings, but was very adult material? Now, if my name were Steig, it would be marketable. If my name were Steinberg, then they could sell it. If my name were Thurber, no problem. So I had to figure out a way of becoming Steig, Steinberg or Thurber in order to get what I wanted into print. I thought of all sorts of things. I could kill somebody, and then get famous that way, and then I could get published. I could commit suicide” — but “suicide was not yet established as a form of self-promotion.”

It’s telling that Feiffer would single out William Steig, Saul Steinberg and James Thurber, then the most idiosyncratic of New Yorker cartoonists — the ones least likely to offer up flip cocktail-party vignettes or tidy, “correct” drawings. Feif fer wanted to be a mold-breaker like those three, but in the idiom of the multi paneled strip. And this strip, were it to exist — well, it wouldn’t be ha-ha funny but mordantly funny, reflecting the humor and outlook of the kind of guy who jokes about committing murder or suicide for pub licity purposes.

Fortuitously, just as Feiffer had run out of publishers to reject him, The Village Voice was founded, in 1955, to capture the new breeze a-blowin’ in beatnik-era Greenwich Village. It was the sympathetic alternative publication that Feiffer had been looking for. He toted his rejected manuscripts to its offices, sat there as its editors avidly pored over his work and left the premises as The Voice’s cartoonist.

His strip, usually six to eight borderless panels, initially appeared under the title “Sick Sick Sick,” with the subtitle “A Guide to Non-Confident Living.” As the Lenny Bruce-ish language suggests, the earliest strips are very much of their time, the postwar Age of Anxiety in the big city; you can practically smell the espresso, the unfiltered ciggies, the lanolin whiff of woolly jumpers. In Feiffer’s sixth-ever strip, an advertising executive is rallying his creative team to make nuclear fallout sexy, proposing “a TV spec called ‘I Fell for Fallout’ ” and “a ‘Mr. and Mrs. Mutation’ contest — designed to change the concept of beauty in the American mind.” The week after that, a macho poet type confides his most shameful secret to his coffeehouse girlfriend: “I’ve never been to Europe.” And the week after that, Feif fer literally puts Oedipus on a psycho analyst’s couch: a hipster in a toga and Ray Charles shades, confessing: “All right. . . . So I marry her. But did I know she was my mother? It’s not like I was sick or something.”

The material may show some age, but from the get-go Feiffer’s visual style was assured and bracingly modern: his figures eloquently but sparely drawn (with a thin wooden dowel dipped in ink, not a pen), and no background illustration, just white space. While the strip continued to plumb topical themes as it progressed — Lyndon Johnson, Barry Goldwater and William F. Buckley Jr. all make appearances in “Explainers” — Feiffer became a nimbler satirist, hitting upon several recurring setups and characters that would transcend their atomic-age origins.

Chief among these characters were Bernard, the archetypal sweet, considerate young man whom women know they should like but aren’t attracted to, and Huey, the vain, callous lout they can’t resist. Bernard and Huey were prototypes of the Art Garfunkel and Jack Nicholson characters in “Carnal Knowledge,” but their adventures in “Feiffer” remain relevant to urban singles life in a way that the blowsy, date-stamped movie doesn’t. In a representative strip from 1960, a comely date tells Bernard, “Sometimes when I’ve hurt you — you get that lost, little-boy look that makes me want to run over and squeeze you.” Two panels later, she adds, “But that doesn’t mean I want your hands on me.”

Of course, representing any Feiffer strip with a quick quotation really doesn’t do it justice. His garrulous, neurotic characters yammer on and on, their logorrhea half the fun (and often taking up more than half the space). A mouse in the clutches of a cat shouts: “Go ahead! Eat me! Play into their hands!” The cat meekly responds, “Can’t we just accept our given roles?” There follows an elaborate back-and-forth about established mores, class systems and man’s paternalism toward animals, which so flummoxes the cat that he loses his appetite and leaves. Whereupon the mouse mutters: “Weakling — wishy-washy. I would have eaten him.” And the kicker: “What can you expect from liberals.”

Feiffer’s basic scheme was to mine the humor of social and political blather — to show, in a funny way, how people talk and talk but never connect. In our current age of blogs, compulsive confessionals and nightly shoutfests on Fox News and MSNBC, it’s no surprise that so many find him prescient.

But paging through “Explainers,” I don’t see cynicism. Given the strips’ vintage, I can’t help thinking of the Simon and Garfunkel song “Sounds of Silence”: “People hearing without listening / People writing songs that voices never share.” As unrelenting a satirist as the young Feiffer was, he had a bit of Paul Simon’s winsome earnestness. His humor was dark but not nihilistic; he held out hope that his characters would straighten themselves out.

Feiffer says as much in the introduction to this book when he explains to Groth why it is he now finds refuge in writing children’s books: “They represent the gentler, sweeter world that, as we grow older, we go about corrupting first chance we get. No, that’s too cynical. Second and third chance we get.”

David Kamp, a contributing editor for Vanity Fair, is the author of “The United States of Arugula.”

San Francisco Cartoon Museum..!

I visited the Cartoon Museum in San Francisco Sunday, September 7, 2008. This museum is a treat for cartoon lovers and presents delightful stimulation to any serious cartoonist. The late great Phil Frank's works and creative heritage are currently being featured at the museum--along with other interesting exhibits.

The Cartoon Art Museum is committed to fostering and promoting a greater appreciation of cartoon art.

Farley's San Francisco Chronicles:
A Salute to Phil Frank

April 6 - September 14, 2008

The Cartoon Art Museum celebrates the life and legacy of one of the San Francisco Bay Area's most beloved cartoonists in a special retrospective, Farley's San Francisco Chronicles: A Salute to Phil Frank. The exhibition includes original art from his nationally syndicated comic strip The Elderberries, panels from Road and Track magazine, his college strip Frankly Speaking, several rarely seen and unpublished works, and his signature comic strip, Farley.

For the most up to date scheduling information, please contact CAM Director of Education Diane Shapiro Sommerfield at education@cartoonart.org or by telephone at (415) CAR-TOON [227-8666], ext. 303.

Blog:
cartoonart.livejournal.com

To register or for more information about workshop, please contact Diane Shapiro Sommerfield at (415) CAR-TOON, ext. 303, or via e-mail at education@cartoonart.org

To receive more information about these meetings and other events for local cartoonists, please e-mail Cartoon Art Museum Gallery Manager Andrew Farago at gallery@cartoonart.org

Cartoon Art Museum
655 Mission Street
San Francisco, CA 94105

MORE CARTOONS: I Know--I'm Having Too Much Fun..!

Panera Bread Writer: Finishing My Two Novels..!

I am pleased to be returning to my fiction-writing projects!

I. My first novel is set in (Appalachia circa 1930) and overflows with fetching, forlorn, forsaken, fanatical characters--embroiled in snake-handling, embalmed in moonshine, embarrassed by intemperate sensuality, and emboldened by mania, morbidity, and magical thinking.

The schizotypal, idiosyncratic, odd, and eccentric entertainingly bother the reader with their personality disorders.

As Prohibition roars into America--one of my protagonists uses this poster in his late-20's-early-30's fool-some-of-the-people-all-of-the-time Crusades in Kentucky, West Virginia, and Missouri--as an advertising prop in his traveling-snake-oil-abstinence shows.

If you lived then, attended one of his 'temperance crusades', and came upon this "P-R" poster...I mean--seriously--would you quit drinking? Snakes play a central thematic role--and the book will not be for the tenderhearted, bleeding hearts, or Harlequin lonely hearts. Below: a watercolor I painted on one of my treks to the hero, Hyman P. Fogarty's, mountain stomping grounds in Hell-fer-Sartin, Kentucky.

I would not recommend the 200 Proof moonshine I was offered.

A man came out of the woods, held a rusty squirrel rifle on me, handed me a jug of what I found tasted like embalming fluid and commanded me to take a big drink. Dizzied, delirious, and dumbfounded by the quaff, nevertheless, I was surprised by his handing me the rifle, taking the jug back, and demanding that I hold the gun on him while he took a deep drink. I still have bouts of heartburn.


I am returning to my own 'roots' (SE Kentucky to SW North Carolina region) to finish this work--interviewing dozens of elderly folk in the region about their experiences. Basically everything in this fictional manuscript will have occurred somewhere, at some time in Appalachian history--but with names changed and identities protected.



II. My second novel (Chinatown/San Francisco circa 1984) features a Ming Vase McGuffin sought after by the Chinese Mafia. The innocent hero, Vietnam Vet Blind Hawk--a descendant of Pilgrim-helping Squanto, who lives in a warehouse fixing up found-junk to sell in flea markets, finds himself caught between the Tong, British Museum detectives, and the FBI.


The story tries to push and pull the reader from conundrum to conflict to redemptive crisis: pure entertainment that won't let you go until the story ends too soon. (There may be a sequel.)

(unpublished works-in-progress): Copyright 2008 by Philip C. Brewer All Rights Reserved