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Explainers: The Complete Village Voice Strips, 1956-1966
The first of four volumes collecting Feiffer's landmark Village Voice strips.
"My aim was to take the Robert Benchley hero and launch him into the Age of Freud." ―Jules Feiffer In 1956, a relatively unknown cartoonist by the name of Jules Feiffer started contributing a strip to the only alternative weekly published in the US, a small radical newspaper called The Village Voice . It was originally titled Sick Sick Sick , but Feiffer changed the name to, simply, Feiffer , because he got tired of explaining that the title referred to the society he was commenting on, not the nature of his humor, which, he insisted, was not sick. Politically, the '50s was dominated by the insipid Presidency of Dwight D. Eisenhower; the backwash of Joe McCarthy; and the Cold War, which was in full swing. Culturally, the Beats were revolutionizing literature, Marlon Brando was changing the face of acting, and Elvis Presley was altering the public's perception of pop music. The post-war suburban bliss of the country was being challenged by sociologists and economists in books like The Lonely Crowd , The Other America , and The Afflulent Society . The civil rights movement was gaining momentum. Camelot was just around the corner, and would be shattered by the assassinations of JFK, RFK, and MLK. The Vietnam War would polarize the country. It was into this scrambled political-cultural climate that Jules Feiffer flung himself full throttle for the next ten years. His strip tackled just about every issue, private and public, that affected the sentient relationships, sexuality, love, family, parents, children, psychoanalysis, neuroses, presidents, politicians, media, race, class, labor, religion, foreign policy, war, and one or two other existential questions. It was the first time that the American public had been subjected to a weekly dose of comics that so uncompromisingly and wittily confronted individuals' private fears and society's public transgressions. Explainers is the first of four volumes collecting Feiffer's entire run of weekly strips from The Village Voice . This edition contains approximately 500 strips originally published between 1956 and 1966 in a brick-like landscape hardcover format.
"My aim was to take the Robert Benchley hero and launch him into the Age of Freud." ―Jules Feiffer In 1956, a relatively unknown cartoonist by the name of Jules Feiffer started contributing a strip to the only alternative weekly published in the US, a small radical newspaper called The Village Voice . It was originally titled Sick Sick Sick , but Feiffer changed the name to, simply, Feiffer , because he got tired of explaining that the title referred to the society he was commenting on, not the nature of his humor, which, he insisted, was not sick. Politically, the '50s was dominated by the insipid Presidency of Dwight D. Eisenhower; the backwash of Joe McCarthy; and the Cold War, which was in full swing. Culturally, the Beats were revolutionizing literature, Marlon Brando was changing the face of acting, and Elvis Presley was altering the public's perception of pop music. The post-war suburban bliss of the country was being challenged by sociologists and economists in books like The Lonely Crowd , The Other America , and The Afflulent Society . The civil rights movement was gaining momentum. Camelot was just around the corner, and would be shattered by the assassinations of JFK, RFK, and MLK. The Vietnam War would polarize the country. It was into this scrambled political-cultural climate that Jules Feiffer flung himself full throttle for the next ten years. His strip tackled just about every issue, private and public, that affected the sentient relationships, sexuality, love, family, parents, children, psychoanalysis, neuroses, presidents, politicians, media, race, class, labor, religion, foreign policy, war, and one or two other existential questions. It was the first time that the American public had been subjected to a weekly dose of comics that so uncompromisingly and wittily confronted individuals' private fears and society's public transgressions. Explainers is the first of four volumes collecting Feiffer's entire run of weekly strips from The Village Voice . This edition contains approximately 500 strips originally published between 1956 and 1966 in a brick-like landscape hardcover format.
528 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1960
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218 people want to read
About the author
Jules Feiffer
159 books192 followersJules Ralph Feiffer was an American cartoonist and author, who at one time was considered the most widely read satirist in the country. He won the Pulitzer Prize in 1986 for editorial cartooning, and in 2004 he was inducted into the Comic Book Hall of Fame. He wrote the animated short Munro, which won an Academy Award for Best Animated Short Film in 1961. The Library of Congress has recognized his "remarkable legacy", from 1946 to the present, as a cartoonist, playwright, screenwriter, adult and children's book author, illustrator, and art instructor.
When Feiffer was 17 (in the mid-1940s) he became assistant to cartoonist Will Eisner. There he helped Eisner write and illustrate his comic strips, including The Spirit. In 1956, he became a staff cartoonist at The Village Voice, where he produced the weekly comic strip titled Feiffer until 1997. His cartoons became nationally syndicated in 1959 and then appeared regularly in publications including the Los Angeles Times, the London Observer, The New Yorker, Playboy, Esquire, and The Nation. In 1997, he created the first op-ed page comic strip for the New York Times, which ran monthly until 2000.
He has written more than 35 books, plays and screenplays. His first of many collections of satirical cartoons, Sick, Sick, Sick, was published in 1958, and his first novel, Harry, the Rat with Women, in 1963. In 1965, he wrote The Great Comic Book Heroes, the first history of the comic-book superheroes of the late 1930s and early 1940s and a tribute to their creators. In 1979, Feiffer created his first graphic novel, Tantrum. By 1993, he began writing and illustrating books aimed at young readers, with several of them winning awards.
Feiffer began writing for the theater and film in 1961, with plays including Little Murders (1967), Feiffer's People (1969), and Knock Knock (1976). He wrote the screenplay for Carnal Knowledge (1971), directed by Mike Nichols, and Popeye (1980), directed by Robert Altman. He was recently given a Lifetime Achievement Award by the Dramatist's Guild.
When Feiffer was 17 (in the mid-1940s) he became assistant to cartoonist Will Eisner. There he helped Eisner write and illustrate his comic strips, including The Spirit. In 1956, he became a staff cartoonist at The Village Voice, where he produced the weekly comic strip titled Feiffer until 1997. His cartoons became nationally syndicated in 1959 and then appeared regularly in publications including the Los Angeles Times, the London Observer, The New Yorker, Playboy, Esquire, and The Nation. In 1997, he created the first op-ed page comic strip for the New York Times, which ran monthly until 2000.
He has written more than 35 books, plays and screenplays. His first of many collections of satirical cartoons, Sick, Sick, Sick, was published in 1958, and his first novel, Harry, the Rat with Women, in 1963. In 1965, he wrote The Great Comic Book Heroes, the first history of the comic-book superheroes of the late 1930s and early 1940s and a tribute to their creators. In 1979, Feiffer created his first graphic novel, Tantrum. By 1993, he began writing and illustrating books aimed at young readers, with several of them winning awards.
Feiffer began writing for the theater and film in 1961, with plays including Little Murders (1967), Feiffer's People (1969), and Knock Knock (1976). He wrote the screenplay for Carnal Knowledge (1971), directed by Mike Nichols, and Popeye (1980), directed by Robert Altman. He was recently given a Lifetime Achievement Award by the Dramatist's Guild.
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January 31, 2011It lasted almost as long as Peanuts (well, it was weekly, not daily), and was done in not when the artist decided it was over, but when his longtime publisher, the Village Voice, gave up on supporting it financially. Feiffer's sui generis is a comic I feel fortunate to have had overlap with my own life, even if I came in on the tail end of its serialization. A lot of it is still fresh to this day -- especially, as Feiffer himself has said, in its depiction of race relations.
January 29, 2016
Insightful, amusing, modern, perceptive, clever, baffling, sweet - 50 plus years on and Feiffer still pleases. The bit about the Bible critic awaiting the sequel is just priceless.
August 4, 2010
Explainers is really a gem of a book, and hats off to Fantagraphics for taking on its publication. Here we have the first decade of Feiffer strips to appear in the Village Voice, from 1956-1966, complete with an insightful foreward from Gary Groth, offset dates, and even an index. Fantagraphics has promised to publish the entirety of Feiffer’s comics output eventually (he was active in the Voice alone for over forty years), and I really hope they manage to do so. I say "hope" since this involves negotiating not only the finances of publication of four or five 500+ page volumes in a 9.5" X 5.5" hardback format, but also in piecing through, organizing, and digitizing the remains of Feiffer’s output from the Voice’s morgue and tracking down extant copies of previously published material where gaps in the record appear. This will be no mean feat considering that Feiffer regularly produced new art on a weekly basis, in some cases on flimsy tissue (the medium on which he apparently drew the illustrations for his friend and neighbor Norton Juster’s book The Phantom Tollbooth).
Feiffer’s style of line drawing is difficult to describe. It lies somewhere between the mad scribbles of William Steig and the flourish of Sempe, and yet nervous… anxious… lacking the pristine quality, the elegance, and evocative playfulness of theatrical lion Al Hirschfeld (no buried Nina’s here). His art looks a bit like the kind of doodle you imagine you might eke out with a thin nibbed pen along the back of a barroom napkin, if you could only draw, which is to say it comes across as deceptively easy, while being ridiculously nuanced. His February 1, 1962 comic (page 281) is an excellent example of this, and is one of my favorites from this collection. Captured here is the face, collar, and necktie of a balding man somewhere in his mid-to-late fifties, ruminating on what he feels society expects of him. This figure is redrawn six times (Feiffer eschews panels, preferring to use text and white space alone to set off his frames), each with the barest nuanced change of expression. The emotions fly across the face as Feiffer's protagonist moves from increasing determination in the first two 'panels' ("All my life people been telling me I have a moral obligation." {Beat} "Before the war I had a moral obligation to fight fascism.") into confused reflection in the fifth 'panel' ("So I can’t be for something because it's just right anymore…."), culminating in worry and dejection, the hangdog expression of a scolded child in the last 'panel.' ("I feel as if I'm living in a moral debtor's prison.") As I read this, I can try out the expressions on my face and feel my eyebrows gradually moving and flexing upward, my lips tensing, relaxing, and ever-so-slightly turning downward, my face as a whole otherwise remaining a frozen mask. Capturing (and observing!) such subtle inflections is the hallmark of Feiffer’s accomplishments. It's remarkable.
As remarkable is Feiffer's writing, which is often wry or poignant, always funny. The rhythm of his gags show a sensibility very similar (especially in his earliest work) to that of Charles Schulz' long-running Peanuts, generally in the form of a series of restated assertions increasing toward hyperbole and culminating in a punchline conclusion which either reveals the whole as a ridiculous cascade of absurdist logic or else inverts the sequence with a statement that undermines the established premise. So for example on page 2 (from October 31, 1956), we see Charlie Brown-like losers, the first of these being a boy who complains in the first two frames: "Eleven years old and I can’t play baseball./Where did the time go? What have I done with it?" before talking himself into nonchalantly tossing a ball in the air (which he misses) so that in the last two frames as the ball rolls away he can lament, "Eleven years…. Eleven years…. {beat} shot to hell…." In the next (November 7, 1956) it’s a suited man against an abstract urban backdrop calling out to various passersby he knows (who ignore him) all the while complaining that "People never notice me…. Why can’t I be noticed like everyone else," before walking off dejectedly as a woman about his age waves and says hello -- an act he himself is to absorbed in his self-pity to see, thus leaving her alone to bring things full circle with, "People never notice me."
As Feiffer finds his voice in the Voice his narratives become longer, more complex, his monologues more self-assured. Nonetheless, they retain the same basic satiric style and form, as can be seen from this largely expressionless caricature of Lyndon Johnson which originally appeared in the Voice August 4, 1966 (at page 521 and easier-to-read version here):
Feiffer repeats a few characters and motifs: the dancer in black leotard performing abstract paeans to the seasons, Bernard Mergendeiler the self-pitying "nice guy," and Elvis-impersonator Huey (no last name here), the square-jawed hipster jock who rudely gets his way with women. Mostly his work offers a cavalcade of distinct people, but in all cases, Feiffer’s comics are a parade of human folly, be it romantic, professional, or political. Personally, I find his least literal depictions to be his most moving work, as in the portrayal of aesthetic compromise ("I am a seeker after perfection") first published on April 2, 1958 (at page 75 and easier-to-read version here):
Along those lines, the comic I found the most moving in this collection was the one whose text and art might have been the simplest of all (page 324, from November 29, 1962). It’s a lyrical eight panels of an undistinguished man and woman holding before their respective faces what is either a mirror or a hoop, all the while saying "I love you." They walk to and through one another, fruitlessly seeking each other while capable only of seeing themselves. The whole is painful and raw, but drawn as such a skeevish cartoon that the effect brings laughter before it triggers tears. Such is the effect of Feiffer’s brilliant work.
Feiffer’s style of line drawing is difficult to describe. It lies somewhere between the mad scribbles of William Steig and the flourish of Sempe, and yet nervous… anxious… lacking the pristine quality, the elegance, and evocative playfulness of theatrical lion Al Hirschfeld (no buried Nina’s here). His art looks a bit like the kind of doodle you imagine you might eke out with a thin nibbed pen along the back of a barroom napkin, if you could only draw, which is to say it comes across as deceptively easy, while being ridiculously nuanced. His February 1, 1962 comic (page 281) is an excellent example of this, and is one of my favorites from this collection. Captured here is the face, collar, and necktie of a balding man somewhere in his mid-to-late fifties, ruminating on what he feels society expects of him. This figure is redrawn six times (Feiffer eschews panels, preferring to use text and white space alone to set off his frames), each with the barest nuanced change of expression. The emotions fly across the face as Feiffer's protagonist moves from increasing determination in the first two 'panels' ("All my life people been telling me I have a moral obligation." {Beat} "Before the war I had a moral obligation to fight fascism.") into confused reflection in the fifth 'panel' ("So I can’t be for something because it's just right anymore…."), culminating in worry and dejection, the hangdog expression of a scolded child in the last 'panel.' ("I feel as if I'm living in a moral debtor's prison.") As I read this, I can try out the expressions on my face and feel my eyebrows gradually moving and flexing upward, my lips tensing, relaxing, and ever-so-slightly turning downward, my face as a whole otherwise remaining a frozen mask. Capturing (and observing!) such subtle inflections is the hallmark of Feiffer’s accomplishments. It's remarkable.
As remarkable is Feiffer's writing, which is often wry or poignant, always funny. The rhythm of his gags show a sensibility very similar (especially in his earliest work) to that of Charles Schulz' long-running Peanuts, generally in the form of a series of restated assertions increasing toward hyperbole and culminating in a punchline conclusion which either reveals the whole as a ridiculous cascade of absurdist logic or else inverts the sequence with a statement that undermines the established premise. So for example on page 2 (from October 31, 1956), we see Charlie Brown-like losers, the first of these being a boy who complains in the first two frames: "Eleven years old and I can’t play baseball./Where did the time go? What have I done with it?" before talking himself into nonchalantly tossing a ball in the air (which he misses) so that in the last two frames as the ball rolls away he can lament, "Eleven years…. Eleven years…. {beat} shot to hell…." In the next (November 7, 1956) it’s a suited man against an abstract urban backdrop calling out to various passersby he knows (who ignore him) all the while complaining that "People never notice me…. Why can’t I be noticed like everyone else," before walking off dejectedly as a woman about his age waves and says hello -- an act he himself is to absorbed in his self-pity to see, thus leaving her alone to bring things full circle with, "People never notice me."
As Feiffer finds his voice in the Voice his narratives become longer, more complex, his monologues more self-assured. Nonetheless, they retain the same basic satiric style and form, as can be seen from this largely expressionless caricature of Lyndon Johnson which originally appeared in the Voice August 4, 1966 (at page 521 and easier-to-read version here):
Feiffer repeats a few characters and motifs: the dancer in black leotard performing abstract paeans to the seasons, Bernard Mergendeiler the self-pitying "nice guy," and Elvis-impersonator Huey (no last name here), the square-jawed hipster jock who rudely gets his way with women. Mostly his work offers a cavalcade of distinct people, but in all cases, Feiffer’s comics are a parade of human folly, be it romantic, professional, or political. Personally, I find his least literal depictions to be his most moving work, as in the portrayal of aesthetic compromise ("I am a seeker after perfection") first published on April 2, 1958 (at page 75 and easier-to-read version here):
Along those lines, the comic I found the most moving in this collection was the one whose text and art might have been the simplest of all (page 324, from November 29, 1962). It’s a lyrical eight panels of an undistinguished man and woman holding before their respective faces what is either a mirror or a hoop, all the while saying "I love you." They walk to and through one another, fruitlessly seeking each other while capable only of seeing themselves. The whole is painful and raw, but drawn as such a skeevish cartoon that the effect brings laughter before it triggers tears. Such is the effect of Feiffer’s brilliant work.
March 28, 2018
Collecting the first ten years of Feiffer's Pulitzer-winning Village Voice strip, this book is freaking incredible. Some of the specifics are dated, but the strips are so sharp and witty, incredibly satirical. The first three or four years are hit or miss, but Feiffer really finds his voice and becomes one of the most intelligent cartoonists I've ever read. A great book.
December 5, 2016
Someone made a balls-up when they merged the various editions here (and I don't feel like fixing it). I read the 1960 first edition of The Explainers, not the Fantagraphics edition covering the years 1956-1966.
April 3, 2025
i used to own a copy. it's always a nice reread. i need to see it again.
February 4, 2015
I used to read Jules Feiffer's comic strips in the 70's when I lived in New York City. I thought he often made great points. This collection is of his oldest strips, before I began reading him; they aren't particularly political at the beginning, but the percentage increases from year to year, especially after the war in Vietnam heated up. I don't know if the political cartoons became much more frequent later, or if I just selectively remember those.
He doesn't really go beyond liberalism, but since it's real liberalism and not "cold war" or Democratic Party liberalism (he has some great strips about the "two party system" and how it functions to prevent any real alternatives) it seemed (and still seems) quite radical. I was amazed how relevant his cartoons about JFK were; you just have to replace the name "Kennedy" by "Obama" to have exactly the right viewpoint on the present time. The specific issues may change but the arguments are still just the same as they were fifty years ago.
He doesn't really go beyond liberalism, but since it's real liberalism and not "cold war" or Democratic Party liberalism (he has some great strips about the "two party system" and how it functions to prevent any real alternatives) it seemed (and still seems) quite radical. I was amazed how relevant his cartoons about JFK were; you just have to replace the name "Kennedy" by "Obama" to have exactly the right viewpoint on the present time. The specific issues may change but the arguments are still just the same as they were fifty years ago.
June 4, 2009
Cartoonist, novelist and playwright Jules Feiffer's Pulitzer-winning comic strip has been influencing and entertaining readers for decades. His internationally syndicated cartoon ran for 42 years in the Village Voice, weaving the social, political, and personal into a perceptive, challenging, often hilarious mix. Feiffer's newest work Explainers: The Complete Village Voice Strips 1956-1966, is the first of four volumes collecting Feiffer's entire run of weekly strips from the Village Voice.
We met Jules Feiffer when he visited the Tattered Cover Bookstore in Denver. You can listen to him talk about Explainers: The Complete Village Voice Strips 1956-1966 here:
http://www.authorsontourlive.com/?p=170
We met Jules Feiffer when he visited the Tattered Cover Bookstore in Denver. You can listen to him talk about Explainers: The Complete Village Voice Strips 1956-1966 here:
http://www.authorsontourlive.com/?p=170
December 18, 2024
First collection of Jules Feiffer cartoons from The Village Voice, covering 1956 to 1966, or Eisenhower to Johnson, Civil Rights to Vietnam, Beatnik to hippie, blacklists to sit-ins, when his weekly strip was I believe titled Sick, Sick, Sick... Which was brilliantly appropriate to a comic that initially set out to explore the neuroses, frustrations, and aggravations of the cultured readership of "America's only alternative weekly newspaper", but ended up additionally capturing the nervous breakdown of an entire country. You can read about what happened during those years in the history books; while these Explainers will give you a much better idea, in spindly-figure satirical form, of how those events affected both the Bernards and the seasonal interpretive dancers of the world.
December 18, 2011
Feiffer's great strengths are his wonderful breadth of imagination and the sheer variety of these strips, along with his dead-on ear for dialogue. Unfortunately, the relentlessly liberal slant wore a bit thin after a while, along with the New Yorkish tendencies toward provincialism and snobbery (especially annoying whenever the discussions turned to TV). And of course you have to put up with an awful lot of psychobabble (but then again, that was regrettably the case with anything that passed through the 50s).
June 18, 2017
[FIRST READING: * * * *]
The only knock against Feiffer (as I've already noted elsewhere) is his relentlessly liberal slant, with its usual smug and small-minded tendencies. Hence he is generally at his best when emphasizing the personal rather than the political (although it's true his impersonations of Ike were most amusingly spot-on indeed). At any rate, he has an uncanny ability to seem to sum up so much of human experience (or a given aspect of it anyway) in just a couple pages of panels. And the sorts of things that one often does not make it a habit to speak or even think about.
The only knock against Feiffer (as I've already noted elsewhere) is his relentlessly liberal slant, with its usual smug and small-minded tendencies. Hence he is generally at his best when emphasizing the personal rather than the political (although it's true his impersonations of Ike were most amusingly spot-on indeed). At any rate, he has an uncanny ability to seem to sum up so much of human experience (or a given aspect of it anyway) in just a couple pages of panels. And the sorts of things that one often does not make it a habit to speak or even think about.
November 10, 2008
Brilliant, brilliant book. His simple graphic style and innovative use of the page is excellent, and I cannot believe how fresh and relevant the content of his strips still seems. Feiffer tells it like it is. One of my happiest discoveries of the year.
August 13, 2008
10 year's of Feiffer's scathing, brilliant Village Voice strips. Genius, for those who can handle it.
August 19, 2008
This book is a sustained work of genius. Essential reading for anyone with a brain, sense of humor and conscience.
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August 31, 2008signing at the store 9-20-08
August 17, 2012
Brilliant cartoonist whose commentary from 1956 - 1966 resonates today (yes, the 21st century). Funny, poignant, sobering, and human.
June 12, 2020
how can you explain the Explainers?
Displaying 1 - 17 of 17 reviews