“Amazing” Cartoonist Jules Feiffer Shares His Favorite Books

Legendary cartoonist Jules Feiffer talks about his first graphic novel for kids and shares some of his favorite books. Few artists have ranged so widely–and successfully–as Jules Feiffer. He’s blazed a trail with critical and commercial success in comic strips, picture books, film, theater, animation and more.

Feiffer got his big break working on Will Eisner’s The Spirit, one of the most influential and important comic strips of all time. When Feiffer asked for a raise, the penny-pinching Eisner offered to let Feiffer write his own comic strip: more work, for the same money, but Feiffer was thrilled. The resulting strip Clifford is a remarkable achievement whose all too brief run of less than two years is the only reason it’s not mentioned more often in the same breath as Peanuts and Calvin & Hobbes.

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But a stint in the military soured Feiffer on the same-old stuff. That’s when his career started in earnest. Everyone loved the work he showed them…but no one would publish it. It wasn’t really for kids and adults don’t read comics, they said. So Feiffer started putting his work in the Village Voice in 1956. His stand-alone pieces created a stir; they were acerbic, modern and unlike anything else. Feiffer would stay with the Voice for more than 40 years. Eventually, they even paid him.

Suddenly, publishers did want to put out collections of his work. One extended piece about a four year old boy accidentally drafted into the Army became an Oscar winning short called Munro in 1961. Feiffer started writing plays for Broadway, became a hit in London and returned to New York City with the Off Broadway smash Little Murders in 1967, directed by Alan Arkin.

On the side, Feiffer dashed off illustrations for Norton Juster’s The Phantom Tollbooth, helping create a classic. He then delivered perhaps the first serious appreciation of the art form he loved with 1965’s The Comic Book Heroes. It’s an entertaining work with Feiffer analyzing what made Superman and Batman and the like special and then offering a selected adventure from each.

The redhot director Mike Nichols regretted turning down Little Murders. So Feiffer handed him an original screenplay that became the acclaimed, Oscar-nominated 1971 film Carnal Knowledge starring Jack Nicholson and Art Garfunkel. (Popeye with Robin Williams and Shelley Duvall was a flop in 1980. But it’s now a cultish favorite with brilliant music by Harry Nilsson and Feiffer proud the family of Popye creator E.C. Segar says he captured the spirit of the original strip.)

And on and on Feiffer goes. He conquered picture books for good starting with 1993’s The Man in The Ceiling and the 1999 classic Bark, George. He wrote a charming, frank memoir called Backing Into Forward in 2010 and that usually means you’ve reached the end, right? 

At 95, surely he’s done everything? Fading eyesight makes it hard for Feiffer to read, but not too hard to create. Feiffer simply does his artwork on larger and larger pieces of paper–18 by 24 Strathmore paper, to be exact, so Feiffer can see what he’s doing. 

“When you work in a different size, and in a much huger size, you find yourself doing things that I never thought of doing before and playing around more,” says Feiffer. “But for me, the work has always been a form of play and I just find different ways of playing. I have a selection of markers that I order from art stores, and I just play. And some of them work and some of them don't. And some I'm comfortable with and some I'm less so. And some I play with, whether I'm comfortable with [them] or not, to see what the effect is. I found that with the advances of age and the limitations imposed by age, that's made me, if anything, more adventurous and more playful.”

Amazing Grapes by Jules Feiffer ($21.99; Michael di Capua Books) Buy now on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Bookshop.org

So it’s no surprise his latest creation breaks new ground for Feiffer by being his first graphic novel for kids. 

Amazing Grapes offers Alice in Wonderland-like wordplay as well as Feiffer’s ecstatic, bursting imagery. It’s all in service of a story about a mom who might be suffering from depression, a dad who quickly takes off for good (leaving behind a few bucks for groceries) and two siblings that take matters into their own hands by venturing to a strange, disturbing land to put things right. As usual with Feiffer, there’s nothing else like it.

Friendly, salty and quick on the mark, Feiffer talks about some of his own favorite books. And he’s not done yet! In his memoir and other works, Feiffer talks openly about his mother’s challenging life and her emotional distance from Jules and indeed everyone. Is the mother in Amazing Grapes inspired by her in some way? 

“I don't think the mother in Amazing Grapes has much to do with my own mother,” says Feiffer. "But I may be wrong about that. Because the mother in Amazing Grapes comes from another world, is a lost soul. And my mother during the Great Depression was a lost soul who had to make a living for the family because my father was unable to. She was in a role she really wasn't suited for or designed for and yet she made work. But at the expense of her own life and at the expense of the love of her children. Nobody loved her.

"I'm trying to get at that in my new book, which is the book I'm working on now on 18 by 24 pages. It’s called My License To Fail, and there's no type. It's all hand written and drawn, and it tries to get at my mother and me and other things in my life.”

“Amazing” Cartoonist Jules Feiffer Shares His Favorite Books

The Complete Peanuts Volume 15 by Charles Schulz ($29.99; Fantagraphics Books) Buy now on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Bookshop.org 

Feiffer fell hard for comic strips as a child, gorging on all the greats, copying them over himself and then creating his own comic strips and selling them to kids on the block and at school. Prince Valiant. Li'l Abner. He loved them all.

“Peanuts is a wonderful example,” says Feiffer. “There was no logic and no sense and there's no way you can chart the trajectory of Peanuts from the beginning. It was simply…it just happened. You saw it grow, you saw it change as it was happening. And it all made perfect sense once you read it. But you couldn't imagine how the f*!# he came up with it. Linus and the blanket and Snoopy. That and the extraordinary humanity of all of the characters, the good ones and the bad ones, like Lucy.”

Pogo Vol. 1 by Walt Kelly ($45; Fantagraphics) Buy now on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Bookshop.org 

Feiffer fell hard for The Spirit and never dreamt he would actually go work for its creator, Will Eisner. Feiffer learned a great deal from the man, eventually contributing directly to The Spirit. He says Eisner probably put up with this opinionated kid because Feiffer was so passionate about comic strips and had an encyclopedic knowledge of them, along with the love of a fan. But not all creators were so generous in person. Feiffer was and is proudly progressive, a lefty really. So he loved Li'l Abner but didn’t care for its creator Al Capp, to put it mildly. “He was a wonderful storyteller, as well as being a Class A asshole,” says Feiffer. “He was a great talent and an awful human being.” 

Pogo creator Walt Kelly was just as liberal, but like some artists wasn’t fond of acolytes who became a little too successful in their own right.

“Walt Kelly started Pogo and Albert the alligator in something called Animal Comics that came out every month,” says Feiffer, accurately recalling details about other people’s work from more than 80 years ago. “ A secondary character was Pogo and it was a little sophisticated for kids, but it was strictly a kids thing. Then it went into the newspapers. Kelly's main paper at the time was the New York Star, which succeeded PM [a liberal NY newspaper that ran from 1940-1948]. Kelly's politics were left wing, and he started sneaking stuff into the strip that was more radical than any strip that I'd ever seen before by anybody. But it worked! It enhanced the storytelling, in some way, using [animal] characters and politics to play off each other to be funny or trenchant. And it was just remarkable. Kelly taught me I don't know how much, an awful lot. And then after I became successful, he didn't want to know me or have anything to do with me.” 

Did Kelly not like being outshone? “There are a lot of cartoonists who were like that,” says Feiffer. “And then there were others, like the great illustrator Robert Osborn [a cartoonist and illustrator, not the late host of TCM] who was a sweetheart. And there were other sweethearts, very supportive and terrific. They all have their own histories and they all grew up being horse-whipped by people they admired. Everybody adjusts one way or another to the heroes who let them down one way or the other and that is how you become a grown up or not.”

U.S.A. The Complete Trilogy by John Dos Passos ($30; Mariner Book Classics) Buy now on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Bookshop.org 

The Autobiography of Lincoln Steffens by Lincoln Steffens (out of print: check your library!) 

War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy ($22; Vintage) Buy now on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Bookshop.org

“I have to go all the way back to the muckrakers of the early 20th century,” says Feiffer, when asked about the books that had the biggest impact on his life. “Lincoln Steffens wrote an autobiography which changed my life. And changes my life to this very minute because it basically became my motto of everything I did from then on.

"His autobiography began by saying, ‘Unlearn. Unlearn everything you've been taught.’ And then he details that, and it just blew me away. I realized that what we were taught in school–which was supposed to be education–was really indoctrination, right? Even in the East Bronx, when I was a boy, we were taught about the Civil War that it wasn't about slavery, it was about states rights. Can you believe it? And when I, a little nebbishy nothing objected and brought up slavery, I was told that I was misinformed.

“I loved the writers in those years who taught me everything about my politics and how to look at the world. The early lefties, Steffens, John Dos Passos with U.S.A. to Dreiser with An American Tragedy. 

“These guys knew how to get across what they wanted to and tell a story. I mean, they knew how to do that. Telling a story and a good story, and involving the reader and creating characters that the readers would believe in was the only way you could get away with it. I remember almost nothing of it now, but when I read Tolstoy's War and Peace in translation, I thought it was the most meaningful experience I'd ever gone through. I thought this book about 19th century nobility in Russia was my story.” 

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Maus by Art Spiegelman ($16.95; Pantheon) Buy now on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Bookshop.org

Ruins by Peter Kuper ($22.99; SelfMadeHero) Buy now on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Bookshop.org

“Of course, the most important one of all is my friend Art Spiegelman's Maus,” says Feiffer when asked about his favorite graphic novels. “I mean, I think Maus changed the game for everybody. And it's a gorgeous book, and I was the first one to give it a quote and Art and I have remained friends for all these years. 

“Do you know Peter Kuper's work? He's remarkable. I love what he does. There is so much work that is so different from mine that has such brilliance and lucidity. The kind of discreet charm that gets at you while you’re not aware you’re being got at. A part of the reading experience, part of the whole experience of literacy, is to be fooled by the author. You think you're going in one direction and suddenly–whoops!–that's not where you were going at all. It's so nice to be tricked that way.”

A Hole Is To Dig by Ruth Krauss; pictures by Maurice Sendak (out of print; head to the library!) 

I complimented Feiffer on the 2011 picture book My Side Of The Car, made in collaboration with his daughter Kate and asked how he got started in that genre so late in his career.

“My first experience with picture books,” says Feiffer,  “I couldn't sell anything to anybody after I got out of the army. And I couldn't sell Munro. So I thought I would do something that looked easy, and I'd do a picture book for kids.

“I did something that I liked and I took it down to Harper & Brothers, which was the best children's book [publisher] around. And [I met with] Ursula Nordstrom, who was the genius behind their operation. She looked at my work, and she said, 'Come into my inner office, there’s somebody I’d like you to meet.' She took me in and there was this kid about my age, but a lot shorter. And she said, ‘This is Maurice Sendak, and this is a book he's just doing now by Ruth Kraus called A Hole Is To Dig. And I took one look at it, and I immediately thought, I have to go into another line of work." 

That would be around 1952. Feiffer wouldn't tackle a picture book again for another 40 years. 

“Subsequently Maurice and I became lifelong friends," says Feiffer. "When I wrote my first children's book, The Man In the Ceiling, I didn't want to give it to my agent who didn't know a thing about children’s books. I called Maurice and an hour later I got a call saying, ‘This is Michael di Capua [a top editor in the field]. Maurice says, you have a book for me. Can I send a messenger?’ And then 24 hours later, he calls me up and says, ‘I've been waiting 25 years for this book.’ And he became my editor then and is my editor preparing this book right now. And it was all Sendak.”

Amazing Grapes by Jules Feiffer ($21.99; Michael di Capua Books) Buy now on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Bookshop.org

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