Starred Review. Before Feiffer received a 1986 Pulitzer Prize for editorial cartooning, his animated
Munro won an Oscar in 1961. His career encompassed everything from comic strips (
Village Voice;
Playboy), novels (
Ackroyd) and plays (
Little Murders) to children's books (
Bark;
George), nonfiction (
The Great Comic Book Heroes) and screenplays (
Carnal Knowledge;
Popeye). Retracing his path of past creative pursuits, he takes anecdotal detours to introduce the talented people he met along the way. As a kid (he was born in 1929),
Drawing comic strip characters on the sidewalk was a way to avoid Bronx bullies: I was never not afraid. Serving an apprenticeship with cartoonist Will Eisner, he felt he was a fraud (My line was soft where it should be hard, my figures amoebic when they should be overpowering), so he instead graduated to ghostwriting Eisner's
The Spirit. His account of hitchhiking cross-country invades Kerouac territory, while his ink-stained memories of the comics industry rival Michael Chabon's Pulitzer Prize–winning fictional portrait. Two years in the military gave Feiffer fodder for the trenchant Munro (about a child who is drafted). Such satirical social and political commentary became the turning point in his lust for fame, which finally happened, after many rejections, when acclaim for his anxiety-ridden
Village Voice strips served as a springboard into other projects.
Writing with wit, angst, honesty, and self-insights, Feiffer shares a vast and complex interior emotional landscape. Intimate and entertaining, his autobiography is a revelatory evocation of fear, ambition, dread, failure, rage, and, eventually, success.
(Mar. 16) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Reader ReviewsI hadn't heard the term "spirit guide" when I was growing up in the Sixties. But if I had, I would probably have nominated Jules Feiffer to be mine. A Jewish-ish kid in a suburb north of Chicago, I was smart enough to see how predicated on injustice much of society of the mid-Sixties was as well as being very aware of my lack of power as a teenager to do much about it. The person who best articulated this perspective (and thus made me feel as if I weren't alone in holding it) was Jules Feiffer. In his strips, I saw someone I recognized as an older brother as he came up against stuff I knew I would come up against shortly. At a Time when there weren't a lot of people to trust, on the basis of his writing and drawing I knew Feiffer was one who would give it to me straight. Not that he offered answers, but he seemed to at least identify what the true issues were accurately, and that was a pretty good start. I came to New York in Time to see the Alan Arkin productions of LITTLE MURDERS and THE WHITE HOUSE MURDER CASE, both of which knocked me out and seemed to me to be the logical next step from the sketches by Nichols and May and Second City that also spoke to me. Then CARNAL KNOWLEDGE came along (directed by Nichols), and that, too, seemed revelatory. (For those who think David Mamet invented candor between the sexes in drama, CARNAL KNOWLEDGE pre-dated Mamet's excellent SEXUAL PERVERSITY.) Again, it gave definition to my confusions. BACKING INTO FORWARD is billed as Feiffer's memoirs. It is not a full account of his life, but it is a pretty thorough account of his thought process in the face of a changing American culture. To be accurate, it is also about Feiffer's part in CHANGING the American culture. (Conventions now accepted as part of comics were innovations he introduced in his strip for the VOICE.) I am fascinated by how what we think of mainstream culture shifted between the mid-Fifties and the late-Sixties. Feiffer was in the middle of this. Having been in the middle, he doesn't offer an Olympian perspective. But he is more self-conscious and analytical than many of the others who were involved -- sort of like the gang's designated driver. Did I mention that the book is entertaining? Deeply so. I wolfed it down in a few gulps, carrying it with me everywhere, reading it everywhere -- subways, during intermissions at the theatre, even in an elevator once because I couldn't be bothered to wait to finish the end of a given section.
Back To Top
