Voice of America has a nice profile up of cartoonist and children’s author Jules Feiffer:
Jules Feiffer was born in the Bronx in 1929. He had a lonely childhood, which he filled by reading the comics of the day and by drawing his own. Indeed, his main early influences were newspaper comics and radio comedy, which were, according to Feiffer, “all about timing and pauses and saying the ‘payoff line’ at exactly the right moment.” So he learned, he says, “how to ‘pay off’ in a comic strip. How to leave a blank panel, or how to use an expression.” He sums up his cartooning as a craft “that lets you do the work through a kind of sleight of hand that the reader wasn’t aware of, but that made your point.”
