SPX 2018: Jules Feiffer On Heroes, Satire, And Style In His Life’s Work

In his panel at the Small Press Expo today, Jules Feiffer spoke about his aspirations toward cartooning in childhood, and praised the “brushline” of the adventure strip artists like Eisner who he felt he could not emulate, and said his realization that he couldn’t do it led him to get into the business of overthrowing the government.
Comic books started with reprints in the 1930’s when Feiffer was 8 years old, and Siegel and Shuster were there from the beginning for him, too. The “assimilation dream of the nerdy Jewish boy who couldn’t get a date” led to Superman and his Clark Kent identity, Feiffer joked.
He was born in the Bronx, and radio heroes as well as movies played a big influence in his life. Popeye (born the same year as Feiffer) figures among his early drawings, as well as sports heroes. The forms of entertainment at the time, which was “up-beat” gave America a sense of its own future during the Depression, he reflected. Sometimes that sense of escape nevertheless gave people the strength to go on, Feiffer explained.
His first published strip “Clifford” appeared at the same time Feiffer was writing the scripts for Eisner for The Spirit. After doing the scripts and layouts for a while, Feiffer asked Eisner for a raise. And Eisner was a lovely person but “cheap as shit” and decided it wasn’t worth giving Feiffer a raise. Instead, he gave him “the back page” in The Spirit. So he did a strip—Clifford.

He described himself as “technically a dufus” who could just erase pages even though Eisner tried to explain how comics worked to him. The reason Eisner kept him around was that Feiffer was a “scholar of Eisner” who appreciated and understood what he was doing, when no one else “gave a shit at the time”. He was the “first Spirit scholar” and there was nothing else he was “competent at doing”.
Feiffer once said, innocently, saying that the artwork was better then than in the early days of the Spirit, but the stories themselves used to be better, to Eisner. Eisner said that if he thought stories could be better, Feiffer should write one. So he did. And Eisner loved it. Feiffer was 17 ½ and was arguing back and forth with a “genius” and was being treated like a colleague by Eisner.
By 1956, Feiffer was working for The Village Voice, and he knew what he wanted to say, but didn’t know how to draw it. But he kept changing styles, types of pens and tools, and finding “grittier” lines by trying different approaches. It looked like the work of several different artists, he felt.
When Feiffer was in the army (between Eisner’s studio and The Voice), he became more of a “satirist” and it made him give up wanting to be like his comic heroes. The Cold War, and things like thought control, which popped up a lot in the army, caught his attention as subject matter. Feiffer’s “enemy in the army was the army”. He resisted becoming a fighting man, and kept trying to maneuver himself into a drawing division, where he came up with a strip about a mistake made by the army in drafting a four year old into service.
Creating a narrative cartoon that attacked, “real satire”, became his focus. He knew it wouldn’t work in syndication, but would have to appear in books, and this became his goal. The army gave him a real enemy to focus on. He had an enemy he could hate and “they could hate” him, too, Feiffer said, “It was wonderful”.

He became known as a “political playwright” by 1970, with works like “The White House Murder Case”, directed by Alan Arkin. He was working in an animated cartoon studio, Terrytoons, at that time. It was a long commute to New Rochelle and back to his tiny apartment, but at one point he saw satire on TV similar to his own ideas, and sought out the creators in real life. He further discovered improv and visited Second City in Chicago, Feiffer said, and he found improv was very like how he worked on cartoons. This was after McCarthyism, but young men and women who were liberal were afraid of speaking out since it might hinder their job opportunities. He felt people spoke in “code” instead, and Feiffer decided he wanted to “decode the code makers” in his comics. The “misuse of language” as a governing force in life and the country, including government, became a theme he followed.
Feiffer feels he didn’t set out to be political with The Noir Trilogy, but there are elements like Blacklisting. When he began writing Kill My Mother, he thought it would be drawn by someone else since he didn’t know how to draw in that style, but no one wanted to do it, so he had to teach himself. He discovered brush pens that could create the effects he wanted at the art store, and took them home. The technology had changed to allow him to draw the way he had always wanted to draw, and with the freedom and style from his own pencil drawings.
But he still felt very nervous, and working on it gave him repeated emotional and nervous breakdowns since he didn’t feel qualified to make the book. But it worked, despite bronchitis and pneumonia, and so he did the other books afterwards. It “gave him the freedom” that age had “stolen” from him, Feiffer said. At the table he can be “any age” he wants to be.
Feiffer felt that at an age near 90, he could create in the style that he had wanted to at age 8 and 9, he said. And the political element is still there, too, in his work in this time of Trump. But he feels the country has been through this before with Joe McCarthy, and other terrible eras in the past. It’s time to turn things around, though, and make this the country “it always pretended to be”, he concluded.