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

by Jules Feiffer (Author)
Key Phrases: Jules Feiffer, Alvin Camus

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
A satirical masterpiece. (Roger Sabin -The Observer )

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 -New York Times Book Review )

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 )

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 )

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

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

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

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

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

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 )

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

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: 9.5 x 5.5 x 1.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.8 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #61,241 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

12 of 12 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)

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 (REAL NAME)

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 (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

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.