When I was young and yearned to become a cartoonist, there was no more perfect role model for me than Jules Feiffer. There are many brilliant cartoonists in my personal pantheon, but Feiffer, 95, is central—and he’s still at it. Amazing Grapes, his first graphic novel for kids, will be published this fall.
Feiffer was the first cartoonist in whose comics I could see myself. A character like the routinely neurotic Bernard was me at 14 through 50 (and quite probably shares a bit of my DNA today). Feiffer’s take on the comedie humane was me in nutshell (with emphasis on the nut).
I worked with Feiffer on his 1982 25th anniversary volume, Jules Feiffer’s America: From Eisenhower to Reagan, which was the thrill of a lifetime. In addition to collaborating with him almost daily for year, I have long collected the books he’s written and illustrated.
Upon initially seeing his drawings, I wrongly believed that he could not draw well. I soon changed that opinion after seeing the layers of emotion he was capable of achieving in what seemed at the time like rough sketches. He was a master of gesture. And this is no better seen than in the drawings illustrating quotations lifted from psychiatric sessions and collected by Robert Mines.
Feiffer’s strips, novels, stage plays and screenplays are infused with references to psychiatric impact, and My Mind Went All to Pieces a (1964) is an anthology of what Mines called being “mentally naked.” It was a no-brainer to have Feiffer illustrate this since his cartoons arguably popularized the comedie psychologique. Besides being funny, many of them are so true it hurts.
