Over the course of a professional career that has spanned some seven decades, Jules Feiffer has built a staggering body of work in a diverse array of mediums, including the theater, motion pictures, novels, and children’s books. But it’s the artist’s groundbreaking work in the world of political cartooning that really put him on the map. Feiffer’s work for The Village Voice began in the 50s and ran for 42 years, earning him a Pulitzer in 1986.

Fantagraphics celebrated the artist’s work for The Voice with the recent release of Explainers, which compiles the first 10 years of his weekly strip.

In honor of the new book, we sat down with Feiffer to discuss the state of contemporary editorial cartooning, the difficulties of penning a daily strip, and legacy of Will Eisner.

[Part One]

You’ve tried your hand at any number of creative fields over the course of your career. Why did you originally settle on cartooning as your primary form of expression? Because it was what you knew?

It was what I knew, it was what I loved, and it was what I had in mind, essentially, since I was a kid. I had no second ambition. Later on in life I became a playwright and a children’s book author, but those were later ambitions. They came out of the cartoons. They were certainly not what I had in mind. Being a writer was the furthest thing from my mind, when I was a young man. I didn’t think I knew how to be a writer.

You wrote a book about comic book superheroes [The Great Comic Book Heroes] and spent time working under Eisner. Did you ever feel a sense of obligation to help legitimize the form?

Not really. The Great Comic Book Heroes was not my idea. Dial Press, at the time, had a senior editor by the name of E.L. Doctorow—long before he wrote Ragtime and the other books that made him famous. We were friends, and he approached me about the idea of doing a book about comic books. So it was his idea. So I wrote it, not just because I thought it was neat, but also because I wasn’t going to make it a work of scholarship, I was going to make it a personal reminiscence, which is what I did.

The one mission that was part and parcel of that was to include Willie Eisner, who was completely forgotten, by that time, and make him a keystone of my reminiscences of comics. By the time I did this, Eisner had abandoned The Spirit. He was a business man now, and doing work on publications and putting out magazines. I thought The Spirit was, at that point, his important work, so that was a rediscovery, at that point, for a whole new generation of readers.

You took over some writing duties on The Spirit from Eisner, at one point.

Oh, I was essentially the writer of The Spirit from 1947, until I went into the army in 1949—two and a half years, or something like that.

Prior to your time in the army, was continuing along that path something that you had considered?

It was a job—it was a very important job, and I learned a numerous amount on the job, but what I hoped to promote out of it was my own daily comic—a newspaper strip. The model of the script was Clifford, which is what I was doing on the back page of The Spirit. Over the years, before I got into The Voice, I made two or three attempts at selling syndicates daily strips—humor strips. They considered them much too sophisticated and much too difficult for readers. They weren’t at all, but that’s what the syndicates thought.

Who were they aimed at? Was it similar to the Schulz model—

Well, remember, I started Clifford before there was a Peanuts, so Sparky and I were going along similar paths from the beginning. I was less interested in doing another Peanuts than I was in the influences that I had. Creating my own strip was more connected to Walt Kelly and Pogo and Crockett Johnson’s Barnaby.

To some degree Kelly, but more so Schulz, when you look back on your work, are you happy that you didn’t have to work with the same characters day in and day out?

You know, years later, when I was vaguely thinking of security for my family and making more money at this business, because, although I’ve had great success, in terms of reputation, I never really made a good living as a cartoonist. I had to augment it. I was doing one strip a week and syndication was seldom over 100 papers, because I was doing essentially something that was not all that commercial. I thought of starting a syndicated strip, and I came up with ideas and I would them and start drawing them, and after the third day, I would say, “this is too boring. I don’t want to do this.” And I gave it up.

It was clearly something that I was not equipped to do. I like telling stories, I didn’t like doing four repetitive panels, day after day, year after year. I wouldn’t have been able to do it. I have great admiration for people who do do it, but it turns out that I was off-kilter, in terms of my ambition, because it wasn’t really meant for me.

Dealing with comics the way that you do, with characters that don’t tend to carry over from strip to strip, do you feel that your work is more focused on abstract concepts than traditional ideas of character and story?

Well, yes. And everyone once in a while, you come up with characters that help you along with an idea, like my character, Bernard, or whoever the President of the United States is became a running character for four or eight years, or however long he was in office. So Lyndon Johnson was a recurring character, as was John F. Kennedy, as was Nixon—as were Bernard and Huey. But that was essentially it. That was all that came to mind, in terms of making a statement.

I was out to make points about the society that I was living in, both as a politically thoughtful person and as a citizen. There was much that I disagreed with and there was much that I was enraged about. When I was into my career for a few years, the civil rights movement began, and my cartoons, if you look at the book, were quite strong and pointed, about those years, and nobody else was doing anything close to that, at the time. No white cartoonist was talking about white liberal and their hypocrisy. And they’re still very pertinent to this day, because very little has changed, in that regard. I was the first cartoonist in the mass media to come out against the war in Vietnam and I did that as early as 1963.

So you think that, despite the fact that the players have changed—specifically the politicians—that the satire has aged well? We’re still dealing with all the same issues?

That’s for someone else to say, but I think there seems to be a relevance to these cartoons done 40 years ago. And that’s not anything to praise me about. It’s something to lament, because we haven’t really evolved that much. It’s not that we’ve gone nowhere—we’ve certainly moved ahead in terms of racial issues in this country, but we’ve certainly also moved backwards, as well. You see the Obama campaign, how race is being used to scare people off. You see Bush’s talk in Iraq about “appeasement,” and you see that this fear-mongering that was present at the height of the McCarthyism is now at work in the Bush administration.

It’s certainly become easier to express these issues in print than it once was. Do you ever think that perhaps it’s become too easy? Are people falling back on the same old gimmicks?

Well, that’s bound to happen and there’s nothing to be done about that. In any form, once there are breakthroughs, the breakthroughs eventually become stereotyped and then they become clichés, and then you’re ready for some new breakthroughs. That’s always going to happen.

In your estimation, who is making those sorts of important breakthroughs, these days?

The one that comes most readily to mind is Art Spiegelman with Maus and In the Shadow of No Towers. I wish he kept at that and did more of that, because he’s a wonderful example of what a cartoonist should be, which is both a writer and an artist. He knows how to combine words and pictures as well, or better, than anyone around. He’s also smart as hell and political. He has enormous skills.

Chris Ware is a combination of being entirely original and clearly derived from influence’s like Windsor MacKaye’s Little Nemo in Slumberland and Frank King’s Gasoline Alley. We all derive from countless influences. And there are others. There’s incredible work being done, but most of it is being done in the alternative media and so-called “graphic novels.” Though there are still some brilliant political cartoonists. There’s my friend Tony Auth, for The Philadelphia Inquirer and Tom Toles in The Washington Post and Pat Oliphant in syndication. These guys are extraordinary. They’re brilliant.

–Brian Heater

One of the great things about interviewing the Jules Feiffer, from an editorial standpoint, is the fact that the legendary cartoonist invariably has some new project to speak about, between a seemingly endless parade of comics, plays, and books, all of which the artist thankfully continues to crank out, a mere six months away from his 80th birthday, to a bottomless stream of career retrospectives that publishers such as Fantagraphics seem to issue like clockwork.

Conducted with the artist after a recent appearance at The Strand Bookstore, just below Manhattan’s Union Square, this interview largely celebrates the latter, in light of the recent release of Explainers, a hardbound volume celebrating the early Village Voice strips that first put Feiffer on the map, released by the completists at the aforementioned indie comics publishing house.

After his discussion [video of which is available here], Feiffer happily signed several towering piles of books for admiring fans, from the aforementioned new Fantagraphics volume, to classics like The Phantom Tollbooth, to the poster for the black comedy, Little Murders, for which Feiffer penned the screenplay.

In this first of our two part interview, we discuss the roles that newspaper comics, Will Eisner, and the Korean War played in the genesis of Feiffer’s career.

You’ve recently completed work on the first draft of your memoirs.

Oh no–this is something like the second or third draft. It’s finished, but we’re in the editing process, which means that the editor is doing his edit, and I’m going over that and making changes and corrections, based on his suggestions, so that should be done within the next three or four weeks.

Have you made any significant changes, over the course of these multiple drafts?

Oh no. Well, there have just been some cuts—what people usually do in these things. I’ve cut 70 or 80 pages out of it, all of which has to do with making it flow and read better and making it a faster and more entertaining trip for the reader.

But going into it, you knew exactly what you planned to focus on.

Oh yeah. The book unwound and as it played out, it was pretty close to what I thought it would be, in the first place. In the begin, I didn’t think it would be as chronological as it was. I thought I’d do a lot more skipping around. I did some of that, but it’s more or less chronological.

And it focuses specifically on your professional career?

Yes. But my professional career also involves—because the work is so personal—much autobiographical detail.

At what point in your life did your professional career officially begin?

Oh, well there’s no question—with the [Village] Voice.

You’d said before that you had considered yourself a “four-year-old cartoonist.

Well, I was drawing from the time I was a kid. But my ambitions as a kid were a very different kind of career, based on the careers that I knew, which were the newspaper comics strip artists that were popular, at the time: Al Capp, who did a L’il Abner; [Milton] Caniff, who did Terry and the Pirates; [E.C.] Seegar who did Popeye. Those were heroes and role models for me—and of course, Will Eisner, a little later, when I was about 12 and became aware of The Spirit.

How did you make the transition to the political strips in The Voice? Did Eisner play a direct role?

It was the United States Army. I got drafted during the Korean War, and my reaction to being in the service and the sense of mindless authority that any military operation oppresses you with—it hits you, right between the eyes—the use of language is misappropriated to not say what you mean, but to maneuver and manipulate people and disguise meaning. All of the versions of that that I had seen in my civilian life plus all of it being so highlighted by my military experience, I decided within months of my being in the army that I wasn’t going to be a traditional comics strip artist. I decided that I had to comment about the world around me and use my cartoons for the purposes of social and political satire. If I hadn’t been in the army, it would have been a very different career.

Would you consider your time in the military, in effect, also the birth of yourself, as a politically-minded person?

Well, I was already a politically-minded person, but I hadn’t thought about using politics in my work, and from the time I got in the army, everything I did was more or less political. The first thing I did, as a young cartoonist, long before I was ever published, was starting work on Munro, which was a four or five-year-old kid who gets drafted, and it was a quite devastating satire on the misuse of authority.

How did you get involved with The Voice, initially?

I had been trying, since I had been out of the army for almost four years, to sell this satirical work, and got no takers at all. Everyone seemed to like it at the publishing houses that I went to. These were 30, 40, 50-page booklets. The political times were essentially not friendly to satire. This was just after Joe McCarthy, and there was still a very oppressive atmosphere, particularly in terms of what the media was and wasn’t willing to print. The Voice, as it appeared, was the one independent newspaper that was likely to run me, if anyone was going to run me. If The Voice wasn’t going to run me, I would have run out of choices and would have had to do something else with my life. I wouldn’t have been a cartoonist.

There was a pretty strong background in terms of political cartooning in the United States at that point.

Oh yes, but there was not a strong background for leftwing radical political cartooning, by any means. Outside of Herblock who was a liberal political cartoonist for The Washington Post and Bill Mauldin, there was virtually nobody commenting strongly in regards to the Cold War, and certainly no one at all commenting from a position as far-left as my own. In other words, it’s not about the tradition of political cartooning—there was a strong tradition for political cartooning. It was the fact that it was radical political cartooning. You have to go back to World War I days—1915, -16—and a magazine called Matches, to get back to radicial political cartoons.

Was it difficult to express that level of consent in any medium, not just cartooning?

It wasn’t just politics—Cold War politics—you also couldn’t talk about sex. No one was interested in anything relating to the lives of the people I saw around me. Publishers were interested more in continuing along the lines that had been established in the ‘30s, ‘40s, and early ‘50s, which is traditional humor and cliché and stereotype. That was fine for them, and there were a lot good careers that developed out of that. There was a lot of good work, I don’t disparage that. It just wasn’t what I was interested in.

As a reader, do you think its more or less difficult to be confronted with these manner of ideas, if they’re coming at you in comic strip form?

Yes. People did not take cartoons seriously. They were not in the habit of taking them seriously. And when people—particularly literary intellectuals—began taking my cartoons seriously, they insisted that they weren’t cartoons. They couldn’t use the word “cartoon” or “comic strip” in regard to my work because they thought it was a lowly form, and they therefore called it “essays” or “one-act plays.” They called it all sorts of things. They called it anything but what it was.

[Concluded in Part Two].

–Brian Heater