Amazing Grapes

About Jules Feiffer

Jules Feiffer has won a number of prizes for his cartoons plays and screenplays including the Pulitzer Prize for editorial cartooning. His books for children include The Man in the Ceiling; A Barrel of Laughs A Vale of Tears; I Lost My Bear; Bark George; and Meanwhile... He lives in Richfield Springs New York. In His Own Words... I have been writing and drawing comic strips all my life first as a six-year-old when I'd try to draw like my heroes: Alex Raymond who did Flash Gordon E. C. Segar who did Popeye Milton Caniff who did Terry and the Pirates. The newspaper strip back in the 1940s was a glorious thing to behold. Sunday pages were full-sized and colored broadsheets that created a universe that could swallow a boy whole. I was desperate to be a cartoonist. One of my heroes was Will Eisner who did a weekly comic book supplement to the Sunday comics. One day I walked into his office and showed him my samples. He said they were lousy but he hired me anyway. And I began my apprenticeship. Later I was drafted out of Eisner's office into the Korean War. Militarism regimentation and mindless authority combined to squeeze the boy cartoonist out of me and bring out the rebel. There was no format at the time to fit the work I raged and screamed to do so I had to invent one. Cartoon satire that commented on the military the bomb the cold war the hypocrisy of grown-ups the mating habits of urban young men and women: These were my subjects. After four years of trying to break into print and getting nowhere the Village Voice the first alternative newspaper offered to publish me. Only one catch: They couldn't pay me. What did I care? My weekly satirical strip Sick Sick Sick later renamed Feiffer started appearing in late 1956. Two years later Sick Sick Sick came out in book form and became a bestseller. The following years saw a string of cartoon collections syndication stage and screen adaptations of the cartoon. One Munro won an Academy Award. This was heady stuff taking me miles beyond my boyhood dreams. The only thing that got in the way of my enjoying it was the real world: the Cuban missile crisis the assassination of President Kennedy the Vietnam War the civil rights revolution. The country was coming unglued and my weekly cartoons didn't seem to be an adequate way of handling it. So I started writing plays: Little Murders The White House Murder Case Carnal Knowledge Grown Ups. All the themes of my comic strips expanded theatrically and later cinematically to give me the time and space I needed to explain the times to myself and to my audience. I grew older. I had a family and late in life a very young family. I started thinking as old guys will about what I wanted these children to read to learn. I read them E. B. White and Beverly Cleary and Roald Dahl and one day I thought Hey I can do this. Writing for young readers connects me professionally to a part of myself that I didn't know how to let out until I was sixty: that kid who lived a life of innocence mixed with confusion and consternation disappointment and dopey humor. And who drew comic strips and needed friendsand found themin cartoons and children's books that told him what the grown-ups in his life had left out. That's what reading did for me when I was a kid. Now I try to return the favor. Jules Feiffer has won a number of prizes for his cartoons plays and screenplays including the Pulitzer Prize for editorial cartooning. His books for children include The Man in the Ceiling; A Barrel of Laughs A Vale of Tears; I Lost My Bear; Bark George; and Meanwhile... He lives in Richfield Springs New York. In His Own Words... I have been writing and drawing comic strips all my life first as a six-year-old when I'd try to draw like my heroes: Alex Raymond who did Flash Gordon E. C. Segar who did Popeye Milton Caniff who did Terry and the Pirates. The newspaper strip back in the 1940s was a glorious thing to behold. Sunday pages were full-sized and colored broadsheets that created a universe that could swallow a boy whole. I was desperate to be a cartoonist. One of my heroes was Will Eisner who did a weekly comic book supplement to the Sunday comics. One day I walked into his office and showed him my samples. He said they were lousy but he hired me anyway. And I began my apprenticeship. Later I was drafted out of Eisner's office into the Korean War. Militarism regimentation and mindless authority combined to squeeze the boy cartoonist out of me and bring out the rebel. There was no format at the time to fit the work I raged and screamed to do so I had to invent one. Cartoon satire that commented on the military the bomb the cold war the hypocrisy of grown-ups the mating habits of urban young men and women: These were my subjects. After four years of trying to break into print and getting nowhere the Village Voice the first alternative newspaper offered to publish me. Only one catch: They couldn't pay me. What did I care? My weekly satirical strip Sick Sick Sick later renamed Feiffer started appearing in late 1956. Two years later Sick Sick Sick came out in book form and became a bestseller. The following years saw a string of cartoon collections syndication stage and screen adaptations of the cartoon. One Munro won an Academy Award. This was heady stuff taking me miles beyond my boyhood dreams. The only thing that got in the way of my enjoying it was the real world: the Cuban missile crisis the assassination of President Kennedy the Vietnam War the civil rights revolution. The country was coming unglued and my weekly cartoons didn't seem to be an adequate way of handling it. So I started writing plays: Little Murders The White House Murder Case Carnal Knowledge Grown Ups. All the themes of my comic strips expanded theatrically and later cinematically to give me the time and space I needed to explain the times to myself and to my audience. I grew older. I had a family and late in life a very young family. I started thinking as old guys will about what I wanted these children to read to learn. I read them E. B. White and Beverly Cleary and Roald Dahl and one day I thought Hey I can do this. Writing for young readers connects me professionally to a part of myself that I didn't know how to let out until I was sixty: that kid who lived a life of innocence mixed with confusion and consternation disappointment and dopey humor. And who drew comic strips and needed friendsand found themin cartoons and children's books that told him what the grown-ups in his life had left out. That's what reading did for me when I was a kid. Now I try to return the favor.