Explainers: The Complete Village Voice Strips (1956-1966) [Hardcover]

Jules Feiffer (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 28, 2008

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 American: 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.

Editorial Reviews

From Booklist

Jules Feiffer has had successful careers as playwright, screenwriter, and, lately, children’s book creator but remains best known for his Pulitzer Prize–winning weekly comic strip that ran in the Village Voice for 42 years. Initially entitled Sick Sick Sick, the strip captured the era’s zeitgeist with acerbic accuracy and mordant humor and was equally incisive in skewering political foibles and gender warfare. This chunky volume, the first of four in a complete edition, shows that Feiffer was at first finding his way visually, for early installments show the strong influences of cartoonist William Steig and UPA animated cartoons. It wasn’t long, however, before he developed the strip’s hallmark willowy look and balloonless dialogue. Such Eisenhower-era themes as nuclear fallout, bohemia, and jazz figure early on, to be joined by 1966 by pollution, unisex fashions, and, above all, Vietnam. Perusal of the hundreds of intervening cartoons discovers that, for all the strip’s contemporary relevance, intellectual pretensions, the banality of television, and miscommunication between the sexes never went out of style as targets of Feiffer’s satire. --Gordon Flagg

Review

“One of the most original social and political commentators in America.” (Tom Clavin - 27 East )

“The modern, non-editorial-page cartoon of social and political commentary was pretty much invented by Jules Feiffer.” (Booklist )

“[Feiffer] ranks as one of the five most important and influential cartoonists in the latter half of the 20th century.” (Rob Clough - High-Low )

“If you were a Martian trying to figure out America in the second half of the 20th century, you could do worse than to start by reading Jules Feiffer’s Village Voice cartoons.” (Sarah Boslaugh - PopMatters )

“A satirical masterpiece.” (Roger Sabin - The Observer )

“To read Explainers… is to be reminded of the absurdity of the human situation, something that might be depressing except for the fact that Feiffer’s comics will make you laugh out loud.” (Rabbi Rachel Esserman - The Reporter )

“His genius is in bringing larger-than-life societal trends down to the human level. Most characters serve as symbols for something larger, but they never feel anything less than human.” (Mason Adams - The Roanoke Times )

“Almost always in the form of near-theatrical monologues or dialogues, “Feiffer” blew poison darts at Cold War-era politics, sexual mores and America’s helpless flailing at the idea of normalcy.” (Douglas Wolk - The Washington Post )

“A veritable Bible of middle class American dysfunction…Feiffer reveals the depths of his subject not only through the dialogues—which are filled with psychological, social and politic depths that few cartoonists have ever plumbed—but also through an amazing skill to capture the body language so crucial to human communication…a real masterpiece worth delving into.” (John E. Mitchell - North Adams Transcript )

“A welcome reintroduction—or introduction, for the uninitiated—to a great cartoonist who boldly bent his medium to adult purposes long before it was commonplace to do so.” (David Kamp - The New York Times Book Review )

“One of—if not—the first of the early writer/artists to emerge from the comic book ghetto into the literary/art world.” (Will Eisner, creator of The Spirit )

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 528 pages
• Publisher: Fantagraphics Books; 1st Fantagraphic Books Ed edition (May 28, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 156097835X
• ISBN-13: 978-1560978350
• Product Dimensions: 5.4 x 9.4 x 1.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.8 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #569,549 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Jules Feiffer lives in New York City with his wife, Jenny. Along with being a famed cartoonist, Feiffer is also the author of numerous novels, children's books, plays and screenplays, including Carnal Knowledge, Harry, The Rat with Women and Little Murders, which was made into a celebrated movie.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

14 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Intellectual angst, July 26, 2008

By 

Robin Benson - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Explainers: The Complete Village Voice Strips (1956-1966) (Hardcover)

I think Fantagraphics should be congratulated for publishing all of Feiffer's Village Voice strips. This first book of 568 pages (with three more editions to come) covers his first VV strip in October 1956 to December 1966 with one week to a page.

Gary Groth's short essay, at the front of the book, puts Feiffer into the context of the times and it seems the times were just right for his wry observations of life in the US: postwar affluence, the Organization Man consumer culture, the military/industrial complex and popular media. The other subject that Feiffer devotes many strips to are male-female relationships, frequently expressed from the male point-of-view with his two regulars: Bernard (timid, insecure) and Hue (confident, scores all the time). You'll see throughout the strips though that he's an equal opportunity satirist because he attacks everyone equally.

Feiffer's drawing style in the first few weeks with the Voice seem to me rather uncertain and varied with sometimes a thick line style, defined panels with plenty of black and speech bubbles or entire black shapes with white figures but by late fifty-seven he had settled down to his unique rendering of figures with captions frequently text-wrapped round them. His faces always seem to display the emotions reflected in the words.

The book is a rather handsome production, landscape to accommodate the strips with each one month/week/year dated and surprisingly a three page index (Nixon appears five times, Johnson fourteen and East Meadow, Long Island once) I would only fault the use of Roman numerals for the first eighteen pages with Groth's essay. Who uses these in the digital age!

Feiffer won the 1986 Pulitzer Prize for cartooning and with this book of ten years of Village Voice strips its easy to see why. I've enjoyed reading a few each day and I'm getting life explained...sort of.

***FOR AN INSIDE LOOK click 'customer images' under the cover.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Feiffer is back, September 19, 2008

By 

Theron P. Snell "A reader" (Racine, WI) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Explainers: The Complete Village Voice Strips (1956-1966) (Hardcover)

You cannot understand the 50's or the early 60's without grappling with Jules Feiffer's strips from the Voice. Exactly what were those Beats and later hippies raling about? Learn the nuances. Read Feiffer. Laugh outloud.

"EXPLAINERS" give us the complete Voice strips from 1956-1966..and gives us back Feiffer's own voice and insight. Each strip has a page to itself, and the strips are presented in chronological order. We get a sense of cultural mores and issues as they developed over ten years..and we see how Feiffer developed.

For Feiffer fans and for anyone who wants to pretend to understand the USA at the time, this is a required read.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars America at Mid Century, January 28, 2009

By 

Edward Aycock (New York, NY United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Explainers: The Complete Village Voice Strips (1956-1966) (Hardcover)

I was thinking of starting this review with the old "the more things change..." adage, but that's so cliche. I'm not above quoting cliches, but even for me, that was too obvious.

I'd love to give a copy of this book to everybody who seems to think that the mid-century US was much more worry-free than the country we know today. Yes, the whitewashing of the fifties into an era of malt shops and housewives was, unfortunately, successful. Feiffer's cartoons are sharp and shed far more light onto the era than a Nick at Nite rerun. Racism, war and the generation gap are just some of the issues Feiffer's characters expound upon.

Feiffer's artwork is nicely reproduced here, and we're lucky to have such a complete collection.