I met Jules Feiffer once at a party some years ago. He seemed uncomfortable (long before meeting me, thank goodness), but friendly and talkative, if that makes any sense. I can’t say we really had a conversation or that he’d remember I was even there - the best I could do was to mumble out that I was a big fan. I read his work in The Village Voice for a number of years when I used to commute into Manhattan, his book The Great Comic Book Heroes was one of my early Rosetta Stones for comics and I’ve probably seen his animated short Munro as many times as I’ve seen What’s Opera, Doc?

Continuing my series on cartooning and cartoonists, Jules Feiffer wrote about himself and his work back in 1964. This is pulled from an oversized saddle-stitched magazine from Allied Publications with the creatively-challenged title These Top Cartoonists Tell How They Create America’s Favorite Comics. It featured an introduction by Beetle Bailey’s Mort Walker and was compiled by Allen Willette.

Here’s Feiffer on Feiffer:

“My work habits are rather erratic. I assume that the process begins by reading…newspapers, periodicals, books (novels, non-fiction, non-books, etc.) And then trying to homogenize what I’ve read with how I feel, hoping the combination will result in a usable idea. The idea is the main thing in the strip: whom or what am I after? What point am I trying to make? What segment of authority am I trying to attack?

“Once I know what I’m after, I go after a form which best presents my point. It may be a monologue, a dialogue, a song, a dance, or a pantomime…or it may even be a combination of several of these. Most of the time is spent in writing the strip. Once written, I sketch my characters in pencil, letter the dialogue, and finish the drawing job with a sharpened, wooden popsicle stick. Average working time: two to three hours.”

To celebrate the publication of Feiffer’s memoir, Backing Into Forward: A Memoir, my pal Danny Fingeroth will be interviewing Feiffer on Thursday April 15th at 8pm at Columbia University in New York City. It’ll take place at 501 Schermerhorn Hall (Amsterdam Ave. & 116th Street). Admission is free and the event is open to the public. Discussion will center around the new book, but other things are almost certain to come up, because that’s the Fingeroth Way. Interested attendees can e-mail IIJS (at) columbia (dot) edu for more info.

Paul Morton over at Bookslut had a great interview with Feiffer just a year ago that’s still excellent reading. Here’s a quote of Feiffer talking about his days as an apprentice to Will Eisner: “This craft that I loved and was going to devote my life to—[under] the terms I was interested in it [of] comic books and newspaper strips—and having a brush line which used thick and thin with great facility… I couldn’t do that then and I can’t do that now. I was in love with a skill that it turned out I had no vocation for.”

Fantagraphics, of course, remains the publisher of record for quality reprints of Feiffer’s stuff.

[Artwork: photograph of Jules Feiffer, circa 1964, photographer unknown, though this looks like the standard “author publicity photo” of the era]