CR Sunday Preview: Jules Feiffer's The Explainers, Fantagraphics Books
Jules Feiffer is the great American cartoonist that for some reason, in a way that kind of breaks my heart, gets pushed to the margins whenever discussions of great American cartoonists take place. I think people may forget Feiffer because his work was published and thrived outside of those places that would become the preferred avenues of exploration for that great 1970s generation of cartooning boosters and enthusiasts. Most hardcore comics fans of that period collected comic books and were at least aware of the newspaper strips, if only their former greatness. Only a select few of that number bought Feiffer's books or regularly read the Village Voice. It's been our loss.
Feiffer's measured, unrelenting, satiric take on the growing fissures in American society post-Freud, post-Beats, post-everything that called into question the country's cultural stability, would become such an ingrained part of the country's outlook that the cartoonist with every year began to stand out less remarkably than he did at first when the initial Sick, Sick, Sick cartoons ripped into the exposed flesh of America's intellectual underbelly. At the same time, the way Feiffer presented his work -- his loose, essay-like passages; his confessional soliloquies, his word-soaked stagings more like a play than anything comics had seen since the vaudeville-influenced newspaper strips -- became more and more of a road not taken by the bulk of his fellow cartoonists and the generation of creators that came immediately after. That last part makes a certain amount of sense; God knows that Feiffer may have found in the Voice the only venue in the world comics marketplace where such an approach could find profit and purchase. Even those with a spiritual debt to Feiffer, like Garry Trudeau, broke cleanly with enough aspects of the Voice cartoons that it became the differences and not the similarities that stood out. To know Feiffer and to love Feiffer, one had to go directly to Feiffer.
And now we can.
I don't know the last time this much great work from a single cartoonist has been circulated back into the public consciousness as suddenly as is the case with The Explainers. The first volume of four planned, it's ten full years of Feiffer's Voice cartoons from the Sick, Sick, Sick work all the way into the little-seen but just as rich material of the mid-'60s. Unlike prose writers and playwrights that explored the same unraveling of American self-identity, Feiffer's work is almost always funny and frantic and a little bit messy. There's no romance to his doomed figures, just an appealing fragility, right down to the lines that define their existence. Sometimes in the best pieces a sense of frayed exhaustion shines through. It may be Feiffer's unique contribution to the way cartoons feel. His work of this period is human in an unblinking sense, in that it makes you grapple with weakness and foolhardy macho and shallow befuddlement and never dares nod or wink at the audience in service of some sort of face-saving heroism, some nobility of bearing. Scarily, Feiffer also reminds us that many of these same crippling states of mind were those running the country. It's great to finally read these strips, as uncomfortable as we may be with the reality it defines: the post-War hangover and Cold War flu from which we still have the sniffles today. -- Tom Spurgeon
