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Jules Feiffer explains it all

By Scott A. Rosenberg | scott.rosenberg@am-ny.com

7:08 PM EDT, May 14, 2008

For more than 40 years, the cartoons of Jules Feiffer graced the pages of The Village Voice, touching on topics such as politics, relationships, business and other facets of American life.

And while the cartoons have been collected in various forms over the years, Fantagraphics Books is now releasing a definitive edition, a brick-like tome titled "Explainers: The Complete Village Voice Strips (1956-1966)," the first in a four-volume set, which has been in the works for 10 years.

Fantagraphics publisher Gary Groth ("and his elves," Feiffer adds, laughing) poured through The Voice's files, culling all the cartoons and other ephemera they could find.

"I had very little to do with it," says Feiffer, who is also an accomplished playwright and screenwriter. "Basically what I worked on was figuring out what the title would be and helping on the design of the jacket and approving the layouts. My contribution was minimal except for all of the crap inside."

His weekly strip, initially titled "Sick Sick Sick" and later simply "Feiffer," debuted in 1956 and ran for 42 years, with a Pulitzer Prize win for Editorial Cartooning in 1986.

When Feiffer, 79, started drawing the comic at age 27, he didn't really know where it was going, he says. He had planned to do some strips to introduce himself to the readers, and then start creating longer, serialized stories. Things don't always go as planned though.

"The introductory strips lasted for 42 years ,and I never got around to the others," Feiffer says.

Feiffer was expecting it would take a year or two for the strip catch on, but it did so in a matter of months.

"It had less to do with me than the period of our history we were living in," Feiffer says. "I just got lucky with the zeitgeist that we were just coming out of our liberal self-denial during our age of McCarthy and Eisenhower. Every group took it for granted they had First Amendement rights, except for liberals on the left who took it for granted that we had no rights of any kind."

While Feiffer no longer produces a weekly strip, he's still quite busy. Among other things, he is working on the book for Disney's Broadway musical adaptation of "The Man in the Ceiling," his first children's book.

And even though he's not working on the strip now, the cartoons found in "Explainers" have a timeless quality to them. The lessons learned from the characters are as relevant now as they were when first published.

One cartoon shows two people talking in the dark, each represented by a candle, lamenting a rate increase from Con Ed. It could have been published yesterday.

There is one topic, however, that Feiffer says doesn't hold up.

"There is striking hostility toward the telephone company as a monopoly," he says. "Little did I know that I'd give anything to get that monopoly back and an efficient telephone service again."

Jules Feiffer is at Strand Bookstore Thursday night.

Time: 7 p.m.

Tickets: FREE

828 Broadway

212-473-1452