Art Spiegelman: Conversations, and: Backing into Forward: A Memoir (review)

These two compelling books offer unprecedented access to their subjects’ politics, neuroses, Jewish identities, and, above all, inner lives as two of the most important living comics artists. Generously illustrated, both also offer the kind of genuinely revealing perceptions that provide a useful basis for comparing their combatively creative responses to politics and culture. In the case of Jules Feiffer’s highly entertaining and moving memoir, his language reads like that of a much younger man (he is now in his early eighties). Witty and unsparingly candid, Feiffer delivers both a revealing personal as well as a cultural history of his times and achieves a judicious balance between recounting his personal and work life.

On the basis of the evidence presented here, there never seems a time when Feiffer was not enamored of the comics, its superheroes and colorful escapism beckoning irresistibly as a way out of the mean streets of the Bronx during the Great Depression: “Brilliance in four-paneled daily strips and fullpage gloriously colored Sunday extravaganzas . . . I loved the look, the dazzling interplay of words and pictures . . . a preferred universe to the one I was mired in” (p. 3). Hardly content to merely fantasize about their art, he plotted to join the ranks of Will Eisner (The Spirit), E.C. Segar (Popeye), and Al Capp (Li’l Abner) by capturing what he calls “sidewalk terrain” and drawing Tom Mix, Dick Tracy, and others with chalk, which earned him grudging respect and security from the tough youths in his tough neighborhood. That basic strategy of establishing meaningful space for himself through drawing (or “backing into recognition” through the use of “comics as judo” [p. 7]), seems to have been the epiphany that launched his career. Also apparent from the early years was a certain precocious skepticism toward both Jews and God—“who, I could see from the basic facts of my life, were almost never on my side” (p. 16)—as well as an intensely tempestuous relation with his mother, who inspired some of the more prickly Village Voice cartoon portrayals of the feminine in the late 1950s. On the whole, the young Feiffer seems to have led a sort of underground existence, not unlike the creature in Kafka’s “The Burrow” (Feiffer’s subterranean immersion in comics taking up the space of the labyrinthine system of tunnels in the story). To this day he expresses surprise as well as pride that he ever “surfaced” to hold his own alongside cultural luminaries such as Alfred Kazin, Dwight MacDonald, Lillian Hellman, Philip Rahv, Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Hardwick, and others who welcomed him over the years.

Feiffer pays homage to the “larger-than-life” Will Eisner and the profound role he played early in his career, capturing his rapturous sense of a kindred spirit. Having “fallen in love with him by six” (p. 50), the teenager later appreciated how the auteur of The Spirit not only shared his Bronx origins but artfully imported its topography and rough-and-tumble sensibility directly into the comics:

His art crawled with Depression-era urban imagery, his drawing dark and clotted and often ungainly. Grotesque and bulky figures fighting it out in heavy-weight balletic violence, the action lifelike, despite its distortions. One felt force behind punches, the physical damage absorbed by combatants. Elevated subway tracks over slimy, puddle, scarp-strewn streets. Filth and decay and sound effects, in graphic detail. You could hear and smell the city.”

(p. 49)

At nineteen, Feiffer’s work displayed little of the promise to follow, but the older man was sensitive enough to recognize that for the boy, “working for him would be like entering the priesthood” (p. 51). Thus, at $10 a week, began a highly rewarding apprenticeship that lasted four years (until Feiffer’s induction in the army) in the muscular adventure comic art that was...