Customer Reviews

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

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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.

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.

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.

This is a collection of Jules Feiffer's scathing, insightful Village Voice comic strips from its inception (when the strip was actually called "Sick, Sick, Sick" in honor of the generation that was brought up on set gags and mother-in-law jokes and consequently confused and disturbed--and challenged--by comedy that satirized the human psyche, labeling it "sick humor") through its first ten years. You'd think that comics that were topical a half-century ago would be dated to the point of preciousness today, when in fact a frightening number of these strips could be reprinted today and be pertinent to current events. (With a few changes of face, of course: simply replace LBJ with Obama in the 8/5/65 strip, and you're back in business.)

The fact that the succeeding decades have found us humans no less puzzled and neurotic than Feiffer's dramatis personae (Bernard Mergendeiler and the Dancer live!) may be explained--after all, what's the title of the book?--at least in part by the embracing of digital technology. Ironically, that is the one area in which this book is a letdown. The beautiful line quality Mr. Feiffer achieved with ink and a honed-down stick (according to the Foreward) is badly reproduced here. Some strips look like faded photocopies, and some of the text is hard to read. Is this the best we can do to preserve artwork, or did Fantagraphics do the printing on the cheap?

If you're able to overlook the technical flaws (though at these prices you shouldn't have to), "The Explainers" is a rewarding experience. Not everybody can present the unflinching cringe-making truth of our human foibles with enough wit to leave us with the dignity to be able to laugh at them.

A trip back to the 60's with all the hopes and fears of the conformist society. Also, the beat generation evolving to the hippies of the 70's.

Good book. Well worth the money.

Even though these cartoons are 40-50 years old, they still resonate with life in our times. While he deals with what were then burning topics such as nuclear war and "juvenile delinquency" (are these problems really behind us today?) he also has something to say about "the mediocrity of television", male-female relationships, educating our children, big business, the arts and culture and much more. He even has a discussion between a cat and mouse which reflects a dialogue between a Marxist and Liberal about how the working class should be viewed....although this might have seemed dated just a few months ago, with the recent financial crisis, people have again begun talking about these things in the way Feiffer described it back then.

I highly recommend this collection.

I purchased this from Amazon half a year ago (and hard upon its release) for twenty bucks and now it costs *six times* that? So much for the birthday gift I was about to bestow. What's going on?

I grew up on Feiffer (I was four when he launched the strip, and it was a regular feature in the LA Times Sunday "Calendar" section by the time I started paying attention in the mid-Sixties) and I second the commentator who remarked on how extraordinarily timely these strips remain. The critics of "political correctness," who yearn for the days when they could utter the vilest racial slurs without raising an eyebrow, much less being asked to leave the party, are dead men walking: Feiffer had their number (a round one; the roundest) half a century ago. I'm just glad that I blundered into the purchase of what has apparently become a coveted and prohibitively costly collectors' item.