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