Most job interviews do not go like this. One day in the fall of 1956, Jules Feiffer, a struggling, twenty-six year old cartoonist, walked into the offices of the Village Voice. The Greenwich Village weekly had been up and running for almost exactly one year. Feiffer spoke with Jerry Tallmer, a Voice editor who also wrote theater reviews. Tallmer loved Feiffer’s work, showed it around the office, and, almost immediately, a guy who had not previously sold a single cartoon was granted complete editorial independence. He could draw whatever he wanted, on any subject. Feiffer started work on October 24, 1956. The strip was called Sick Sick Sick, and it ran for 40 years.

Snatching up Feiffer was an enormous coup for the young Voice, which needed time to figure out what it wanted to be. The paper was founded by Dan Wolf, Edwin Fancher, and a young Norman Mailer, who brought the cash. Mailer would soon run off to a career in brawling literary stardom, but Wolf and Fancher were in for the (relatively) long haul, and for years they were close to broke. Newspapers take time, and while the Voice would eventually earn its reputation for political and journalistic radicalism, the early Voice is not the druggy, sexed-up weekly that we expect it to be. Politically, it leaned to the left, but gently, unobtrusively so, and in any case this was not a difficult political stance in Greenwich Village. Journalistically, it was a by-the-book local paper. The editors frequently polled the locals and published various non-radical findings: “Here’s what Villagers Want! More: Parks, Police, Playgrounds. Less: Noise, Rents.”

If the early Voice is still a good read (which it usually is), it’s thanks to the neighborhood. The Voice had the good fortune to be covering mid-twentieth century Greenwich Village, which may actually have been as exciting and improbable as people say it was. In the 1950s, helped out by the GI Bill as well as low rents, the concentration of soon-to-be renowned artists went way up. Willem de Kooning, Norman Mailer, Jackson Pollock, Dylan Thomas, Franz Klein, Allen Ginsberg, and James Baldwin all lived there, all at the same time. Packed into a neighborhood about a tenth of the size of Paris’ Left Bank, these artists (and their attendant egos) made sure that the Voice never lacked for material. My favorite headline comes from January 7, 1957: “Aesthetic Realism is New, True, Important, Says Society.” The artists and local weirdos helped the paper to bide its time as it searched for talent.

Feiffer was ahead of the curve. Just how far ahead can be seen in the new book Explainers — The Complete Village Voice Strips (1956-66).  Like his peers, Feiffer was liberal, but viciously so, and his strips were frequently directed at people who agreed with him. In one early strip, a dumpy, middle aged man analyzes his activism away. “I used to be a rebel in my youth,” he says, leaning back and nursing a mug of beer. “Now when I feel aroused by a Civil Rights case or a passport hearing, I realize it’s just a device. I go to my analyst and we work it out.” He drew cartoons about relationships gone maliciously wrong. Feiffer claims, in the introduction, that this was a matter of practicality: “Why would I do a strip about a marriage that worked,” he says. “Where’s the humor?” Don’t believe him. All kinds of relationships are funny, but Feiffer is only interested in the ones that are horrible. There are little bits of optimism here and there in his work — a female dancer in a black leotard is a recurring hopeful figure — but these are usually overwhelmed by anger, hypocrisy, sarcasm, and misanthropy. In the Voice’s tentative early years, Feiffer thrashed around like the paper’s unhappy id.

His thrashing usually happened like this: something between six and ten borderless panels arranged into two rows. Sometimes his characters are going places or doing things, but usually they stand still and talk. And talk and talk. Feiffer’s panels are stuffed with text, and the more his characters speak, the less they tend to be saying. A strip published in the middle of 1957 imagines a game show where contestants win increasing cash prizes based on their ability to perform self-analysis. (This game show, in a slightly modified form, now actually exists. It’s called Moment of Truth. In one episode, a woman was asked to explain her failure to pass the lie detector question, “Do you think you are a good person?”). Feiffer never gives us the actual game show. Instead, we watch the host recap the previous week’s events:

Evelyn, will you go into the auto-suggestion booth and take your regular place on the psycho-prompter couch? Now, Evelyn, last week you went up to $40,000 by properly citing your rivalry with your sibling as a compulsive sado-masochistic behavior pattern which developed out of an early post-natal feeding problem. But — later, when asked about pre-adolescent Oedipal phantasy repressions, you rationalized twice and mental blocked three times.

This gets us through the fourth panel. There are six more. The intermingling of brand-jargon (psycho-prompter couch), game show score-keeping, and psycho-babble is a common feature of Feiffer’s work. His characters rarely use words to really confront things. Their words avoid, manipulate, or deceive in subtle ways. They are packages with no contents. It is not coincidental that the character on the book’s cover is gesturing furiously and speaking nonsense: “Gibble gabble gibble gabble gibble …”

Anxiety is at the center of Feiffer’s rambling, angry work. It makes his characters talk endlessly away. It makes them fail, and forces them to unwillingly dismantle their own relationships and ideals. It pushes them into the misery of analysis — which, incidentally, never helps. Feiffer once told an interviewer that he drew people “who use analysis not as a cure but as an extension of their own neuroses.” His work comes close to suggesting an equivalence between being anxious and being human.

As destructive as all this worrying is, however, it’s what makes Feiffer’s characters interesting; and as a way of seeing the world — as a way of being in the world, even — it firmly locates Feiffer’s work in the United States during the second half of the twentieth century. There is a lot about Feiffer’s work that seems weirdly contemporary — from the media-zation of our personal lives to the meticulously empty rhetoric of politics — but the anxiety gives it away. With the atomic bomb always looming but never quite in view, dread became a kind of mode of existence. Today, it’s the suitcase bombs and exploding buses that we have to look out for, and the suitcase bombs aren’t quite powerful enough for dread. Were he starting out today, Feiffer might trade anxiety for an irony reflex.

Feiffer’s central character — a kind of neurotic, horny Charlie Brown — is Bernard Mergendelier. Bernard is a genius of anxiety. “Outside I seem to be stable and steady,” He says in an August, 1961 strip. “But it’s only a disguise. Inside I see myself as self-pitying, indecisive, lonely and ineffectual.” This is a familiar sort of loser. What makes Bernard special is that he’s not even secure in his own self-loathing. Trying to talk a woman into another date, Bernard completely reverses the equation: “I’m one kind of me to you — quiet, withdrawn very shy … I’m a completely different kind of me with everyone else — responsible, commanding, efficient. You couldn’t keep your hands off me.” But even when Bernard does get the girl, he worms his way back into loneliness: how could she have any self-respect? he thinks. These endless permutations all lead to the same place. “Most of the time I feel just like me,” Bernard says, “So I drink.”

Bernard also has an inverse: Huey. Big, handsome, fleshy Huey is not anxious (which means that he is also boring). Girls sleep with him. Specifically, smart girls sleep with him. Feiffer describes going to parties and seeing Radcliffe girls and Swarthmore girls — all gorgeous — “draping themselves over these imitation Brando types who were big, muscular, illiterate thugs.” While Bernard winces his way through every potentially romantic interaction, Huey’s cool — his indifference, really — is indestructible. In one strip, he calls up his messaging service: “Faith called at 7am. She says if you don’t call her by 11:00 she will kill herself. Lola called at 9:30. Said she will call back later.” Huey lets the anxiety of others orbit around him; eventually, always, someone comes running to him. It’s not just that Huey has success in bed while Bernard doesn’t. It’s that Huey has success with the same women who refused Bernard. The smart choice for these intelligent, caring, anxious women would be to go out with intelligent, caring, anxious Bernard. But they go for Huey. And Bernard twists on.

In 1961, the Voice found its politics. Carmine “The Bishop” DeSapio was a local machine boss who spent his time manipulating district-level elections and anointing mayoral and even gubernatorial candidates. He had been running political life in the Village since 1939. In its first years, the Voice ran some puff pieces and generally stayed out of his way, but when DeSapio organized the defeat of a Mrs. Gwen Worth for the position of secretary of the Greenwich Village Association, the Voice turned on him. The headline read, “The long arm of Carmine DeSapio has reached into the Greenwich Village Association.” The paper began openly calling for DeSapio’s defeat in an upcoming primary, and while he didn’t go down immediately, he was eventually beaten. The Voice had discovered its political teeth.

Feiffer was doing the same. While he had drawn strips about Eisenhower before, it was the 1960 Nixon-Kennedy contest that prompted regular political engagement. On October 6, 1960, Feiffer drew Nixon for the first time: “I believe Senator Kennedy believes what he believes sincerely as I believe that I believe what I believe sincerely.” Three weeks later, he drew Kennedy: “Now the question is this: Number one — Are we doing all we can about Cuba? Number one-a — I don’t believe we are! Number two — In a white paper last week I suggested that we should do all in our power …”  He would warm to Kennedy. Not so much with Nixon.

Kennedy’s appearances in Feiffer’s strip are weirdly infrequent, maybe because Feiffer found himself liking the young President and not knowing what to do about it. A good President is like a good marriage: where’s the humor? Feiffer seemed to agree with Norman Mailer, who famously wrote, on the eve of the 1960 election, “I feel the hints, the clues, the whisper of a new time coming.” Kennedy’s assassination, in November of 1963, prompted one of Feiffer’s most poignant strips. It was published on January 2, 1964, more than a month after the event. He gave the idea time. In the strip, a small girl reads from a book:

Once there was a sleeping country that had spent eight years under a spell. Nobody talked. Nobody argued. Everybody slept. Then one day into this country rode a handsome young prince. “It’s time to get moving again,” the prince declared. The country stirred in its sleep. For the first time in years people actually began to talk. They argued. They took sides. “Stop talking so loud!” the rest of the country grumbled in its sleep. “Have some consideration for the rest of us.” But the talking only became louder. More and more people awoke and, angry that they had to be awake, began to talk, began to argue, began to take sides.

Then one day the young prince was killed — no one could agree by whom. Every side accused every other side. But calmer heads prevailed. “See what we have come to with this wicked dissension,” calmer heads argued. “Let us cleanse our society of this divisive debate!” And the country, suffering from wounds and guilt, cheered. Debate halted. Argument died. And there was no more talk in the land. And as the country prepared for sleep it hoped no one would ever ask it to move again —
For it really did not want to kill any more princes.

Feiffer could understand people shying away from the consequences of political debate in this one instance, but he could never condone it. During the Civil Rights movement, he was insistently critical of liberal whites who wouldn’t commit, even inventing an imaginary political group, the Radical Middle, to articulate their “radical” views. One 1964 character is named Mr. Whitey Backlash. In another strip, from 1963, a black man starts following a white man on his way to work. “I’m a social sit in,” says the black man. “We integrate people.” The white man isn’t happy: “Look, I do my bit! Every day I deliberately sit next to one of you on the bus!” The last panel makes the dynamic painfully explicit: “Civil rights used to be so much more tolerable before Negroes got into it.”

His feelings for Lyndon B. Johnson were complicated. Feiffer saw him as something of a Texas grotesque — he takes a slightly perverse pleasure in drawing the loose folds of LBJ’s face — but he admired the President’s mix of political gamesmanship and idealism. In a December 1964 strip, a wide-eyed group looks up as LBJ’s feet dangle out of the sky. “O, What do you see, Mr. President-of-all-the-people?” they ask. “I see a land where love reigns. I see great farms and giant cities. I see men at work, children at play, women at peace.” And how, Mr. President, will this world come to be? “I shall wheel and deal.” This is the high point of Feiffer’s opinion of LBJ. The failure of Johnson’s Great Society, as well as his escalation of the Vietnam War, prompted a pessimistic turn.

This pessimism was not unjustified. Liberalism was on its way to attempting suicide at the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago. Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy had both been killed earlier in the year. Police responded to protests throughout Chicago with brutal displays of force, using so much tear gas that Hubert Humphrey himself was affected in his hotel shower. Television coverage swung wildly back and forth between scenes of street violence and Humphrey’s victory in the convention hall. Liberalism was tearing itself apart while simultaneously planting the seeds of the culture wars. Norman Mailer wrote, “We will be fighting for forty years,” and he was right. Feiffer’s strips show the culture wars in the process of articulating themselves. Reading them, you can watch liberalism tie its own noose.

Again and again, in a clear voice, Feiffer seems to tell his readers, “Your politics are worse than you think they are. Your relationships are running on collaborative self-deception. The world is getting worse because of your good intentions.” Near the end of his first decade at the Voice, he generalized his pessimism in a dreamy, brutal strip that probably stands as his bleakest. A woman goes out into nature, hoping to get away from the oppressive mechanization of city life. As she talks about watching the flowers grow, something starts rising from the ground. It looks like a stem. It’s actually a rifle. The woman, looking up, takes relief “in the knowledge that, no matter how hard he tries, man can’t corrupt every — .” The gun blows her away. It sinks back into the ground, smoke trailing out of the muzzle in little curlicues.

Which raises the question: why read this strip? Why spend time with these characters? Why feel this bad? Charles Schultz’ Peanuts was suffused with melancholy, but it was also gentle, and when Lucy pulled the football away there was love behind it. With Feiffer, the love can be hard to spot, but if it’s anywhere, it’s in the drawing. While he needed a few years to arrive at a style he felt comfortable with, Feiffer’s drawing was good right away. His lines are freewheeling, jittery, spidery, but they have an almost freakish precision to them. His faces, in particular, are great, twitching and shifting from panel to panel but always with good reason. They let you know that his characters are paying attention, that they’re thinking — that they’re anxious.

They’re also fun. The pleasure in reading a Feiffer cartoon lies in watching his lines fly together, an infinite series of happy faux-accidents. Early on, he started drawing with a wooden dowel, sharpened and dipped in ink, which gave his lines an unpredictability and a weight that a pen couldn’t provide. One of his best strips was published in November 20, 1957. The text is your standard Feiffer hand-wringing: a man walks down the street, wondering at his own inability to pull off being a beatnik. “What I wouldn’t give to be a non-conformist like all those others,” he says. What’s wonderful about the strip is what isn’t being said. Bopping down the street, snapping away, a beatnik dances around the dumpy protagonist. Meaningless slang, written in a flowy cursive hand, tumbles from his mouth — “Oyes man, mm, oyes” — and his scarf trails off behind him. On the one hand, yes, we get the joke, and we laugh and feel a little worse about ourselves. On the other hand, that beatnik is a lot of fun to look at, and the smile he provokes is uncomplicated, maybe even a little childlike.

And that’s where Feiffer’s strip gets a lift. He is frequently credited with being one of the first to write cartoons for grownups, and he deserves the acclaim, but it is also the case that comics are essentially childish things. They are what kids do for fun. They make line drawings of little people, alone or maybe in small groups, flying around, standing in front of wobbly, boxy homes and saying things to one another. Comics are for kids, even when they are for grownups. They are innocent in ways that are unique to the medium. The words can be as jaded as they like, but the drawings remain gently, delicately naïve.

Feiffer once drew a comic strip about art and innocence. It was published on December 12, 1959. It begins with the female dancer, suited up in a black leotard, announcing “A dance to the loss of innocence.” She begins to explain her theme: “In this dance I have symbolized youth, its hopes, its wishes, its dreams … and then comes disillusion.” She keeps going, but once she actually starts describing the loss of innocence in all its bitterness, she doesn’t feel like dancing anymore. The last panel finds her trudging off to the side, arms folded, gazing helplessly off into the middle distance. Feiffer is arguing for a necessary connection between innocence and creativity, the idea that you can’t go and make art without a little unjustifiable leap of faith. When he says that “optimism” is at the center of everything he does, he’s telling the truth. If he wrote novels or essays, he would probably be lying.

Feiffer left the Voice in 1997 over a salary dispute. He has since completely stopped cartooning, and today he is mostly known for his children’s books — The Man in the Ceiling, I Lost My Bear, and others. He says now that these books are his “primary form of protest,” that they constitute a defense of a gentler world that adults corrupt at the earliest opportunity. Maybe. But it would also be a good thing to have his strips showing up somewhere once a week. It’s not that we lack for participants in political discourse. But we could probably use a few more adults in the conversation.

¡Richard Beck ’09!