the great comic book heroes by jules feiffer

He was doing what I dreamed of doing: using comic art as commentary. Suddenly, there was Jules’s strip every week, describing the way we lived-our hang-ups, our desires, our fears, our politics. In 1956, when his strip in The Village Voice began appearing, I was an art director at CBS Television designing ads for I Love Lucy, Amos ‘n’ Andy, and other shows that I found unwatchable. His work as a cartoonist, a novelist, a playwright, and a creator of children’s books over the past 70 years inspired me to attempt things I never would have without his example.

And, in a way, I owe the career I’ve had as a caricaturist to Jules. I live in Manhattan but was determined to pay Jules a visit-we have been friends for half a century, and I was the best man when Jules married Joan. It turned out that the air around Cooperstown, New York, was about as good as you could get, so Joan and Jules bought a house in a nearby town. Joan Holden, Jules’s wife, wasted no time in doing research to find out which area had the best air quality.

But Jules’s doctor gave him an additional admonishment: Jules had to move far away from his home on Shelter Island. We both became cartoonists, and last year, both of us ended up in different emergency rooms with heart failure, in the same week.Īfter four or five days, we were both discharged from the hospital with pretty much the same array of pills, as well as orders to stay away from salt. We both grew up to be terrible at sports, and we both started to draw characters from the comics when we were 8 or 9 years old. Out of print for over 30 years, Feiffer's book discusses the role that the patriotic superhero played during World War II in shaping the public spirit of civilians and soldiers, as well as the escapist power these stories held over the zeitgeist of America.With wit and insight Feiffer discusses what the great comic book heroes meant to him as a child and later as an artist along with his trenchant and wrly-written commentary, the book includes numerous illustrated examples of strips and characters discussed.Jules Feiffer and I were born 94 years ago in the Bronx, two months apart. In the book, Feiffer writes about the unique the place of comics in the space between high and low art and the power which this space offers both the creator and reader.The Great Comic Book Heroes is widely acknowledged to be the first book to analyze the juvenile medium of superhero comics in a critical manner, but without denying the iconic hold such works have over readers of all ages.

In 1965, Feiffer wrote what is arguably the first critical history of the comic book superheroes of the late 1930s and early 1940s, including Plastic Man, Batman, Superman, The Spirit and others. Fantagraphics is proud to publish Jules Feiffer's long out-of-print and seminal essay of comics criticism, The Great Comic Book Heroes, in a compact and affordable size.

The great comic book heroes by jules feiffer