It must be comics week over at the Onion’s AV Club. First there’s an extensive Jeff Smith interview. Now we’re blessed with one with Explainers author Jules Feiffer:
The A.V. Club: It’s surprising, reading the book, how early the strip’s sensibility was formed. Almost right from the beginning, you deal with the themes that preoccupied you for the next 40 years.
Jules Feiffer: Originally, there were going to be a few weeks of introductory strips before I started serializing Munro. When I went to the Voice, I showed them Munro—and maybe Passionella, although I’m not sure I’d written Passionella by then—and something on the bomb called Boom!—what today would be called graphic novellas. They were just long narrative cartoons. They had political content to the extent that they were strongly anti-government, anti- the prevailing political tides of the time. I though what I’d do was break the longer stuff down into weekly installments, but I thought it might be difficult in the beginning for readers to figure out what I was doing and what the hell was going on, so perhaps I should do five or six or seven weeks of introductory strips to tell them who I was and what I was going to do. The introductory strips were still taking over 40 years later. Once I got into the habit and routine of it, I realized what a good format this was for me, and how much better it was than serializing work I’d already done which wasn’t designed for that format and would never be ideal for it.
November 16th, 2008 at 12:32 pm
You might enjoy this Mr. Media podcast interview with cartoonist Jules Feiffer, who talks about the new collection of his comic strips from the Village Voice, Explainers, getting his start with Will Eisner on The Spirit, his plays (Little Murders), his movies (Carnal Knowledge, Popeye), the Disney musical adaptation of The Man in the Ceiling, and his forthcoming memoirs.