In a career spanning more than five decades, cartoonist and playwright Jules Feiffer rewrote the rules on what could be done with the newspaper comics strip. His groundbreaking strip, Sick, Sick, Sick, retitled Feiffer in 1959 when it went into national syndication, began life in the pages of New York City’s the Village Voice in 1956. Sick, Sick, Sick was an odd duck of a comic strip that eschewed cute “funny animals” as characters and wacky kiddie fare in favor of presenting readers with a mirror reflection of themselves, with their foibles and neuroses taking center stage. Family, relationships, insecurity, race, religion and sexuality were just some of the myriad concerns Feiffer’s work examined, often in both painful and hilarious detail.
On May 28, Fantagraphics will publish Feiffer’s Explainers: The Complete Village Voice Strips 1956-66, the first of four dense hardcover books collecting the all of Feiffer’s strips, which contains roughly 500 strips from the series’ first decade. Initial printing is 5,000 copies, and as an added bonus, Feiffer will read from the strips in person at the Strand bookstore in Manhattan on Thursday, May 15, at 7 p.m., followed by a question and answer session and a book signing.
“When I started the strip in the 1950s,” Feiffer recounted in an interview with PWCW, “I never tried to make it like anything else.” He continued, “Cartooning was my form, so I put conversation on paper, and nobody had bothered to do that before. And as this was the ’50s, I made a point of using humor, being funny, to get away with what I was saying.” Readers quickly related to the fallible humanity of Feiffer’s characters, a nervous-looking bunch of neurotics who functioned in stark but humorous contrast to their cartoon brethren in syndicated comics strips like Peanuts or Family Circus.
Plus, Feiffer explained, in those years psychoanalysis was beginning to attract a following. “A certain group of young people were bitten by the Freudian bug, and the strip was the only place they found themselves represented in those days,” he said. Compared to contemporaneous cartoon works, Feiffer appeared visually sparse, often possessing no backgrounds or settings for the characters to interact in, lacking even that most fundamental element of the visual structure of comics, the simple panel border and gutter. However, there was method fueling Feiffer’s creative decision: “The panelless format came about from struggling to find an approach to best tell the story to the reader and get them from panel one to panel six, and ended up as an exercise in self-effacement. Modestly, self-deprecatingly getting away with it.”
Asked why the volume doesn’t bear the strip’s original title of Sick, Sick, Sick, Feiffer said the book collection’s title has everything to do with the strip’s cast of all-to-human characters. “Explainers seemed to be an appropriate title since my characters were always explaining themselves falsely or wrongly, trying to put their best face forward. But the truth of it was they were unreliable witnesses to their own problems.”
