Overview
Subversive, funny, and effortlessly droll, Jules Feiffer’s cartoons were all over New York in the 1960s and ’70s—featured in the Village Voice, but also cut out and pinned to bulletin boards in offices and on refrigerators at home. Feiffer describes himself as “lucking into the zeitgeist,” and there’s some truth to the sentiment; Feiffer’s brand of satire reflected Americans’ ambivalence about the Vietnam War, changing social mores, and much more.
Feiffer’s memoir, Backing into Forward, like his cartoons, is sharply perceptive with a distinctive bite of mordant humor. Beginning with his childhood in Brooklyn, Feiffer paints a picture of a troubled kid with an overbearing mother and a host of crippling anxieties. From there, he discusses his apprenticeship with his hero, Will Eisner, and his time serving in the military during the Korean War, which saw him both feigning a breakdown and penning a cartoon narrative called “Munro” that solidified his distinctive aesthetic as an artist. While Feiffer’s voice grounds the book, the sheer scope of his artistic accomplishment, from his cartoons turning up in the New Yorker, Playboy, and the Nation to his plays and film scripts, is remarkable and keeps the narrative bouncing along at a speedy clip. A compelling combination of a natural sense of humor and a ruthless dedication to authenticity, Backing into Forward is full of wit and verve, often moving but never sentimental.
“Jules Feiffer’s original and neurotic voice. . . . reinvented comics in the 1950s and made possible what’s now called the ‘graphic novel.’ His engaging new memoir is told in that same witty and perceptive New York cadence, mellowed and laced with wisdom. He’s an inspiration.”—Art Spiegelman
Synopsis
The award-winning cartoonist, playwright, and author delivers a witty, illustrated rendition of his life, from his childhood as a wimpy kid in the Bronx to his legendary career in the arts.
A gifted storyteller who has delighted readers and theater audiences for decades, Jules Feiffer now turns his talents to the tale of his own life.
Plagued by learning problems, a controlling mother, and a debilitating sense of fear, Feiffer embarked on his first cartoon apprenticeship at the age of seventeen, emboldened only by a passion for success and an aptitude for failure. He vividly recalls those transformative years working under the legendary Will Eisner, and later, after he was drafted into the army, his evolution from “smart-ass kid into an enraged satirist.” Backing into Forward also traces Feiffer's love life, from a doomed hitchhiking trip to reclaim his high-school sweetheart to losing his virginity in Greenwich Village, and his road to marriage and fatherhood.
At the center of this journey is Feiffer's prolific creativity. In dazzling detail, he recounts the birth of his subversive graphic novella Munro, his entrée into New York's literary salons, collaborations with film greats Mike Nichols, Robert Altman, and Jack Nicholson, and other major turning points. Brimming with wry punch lines, slices of Americana, and pithy social commentary, Backing into Forward charts Feiffer's rise as an unlikely and incisive provocateur during the conformist fifties and the Vietnam and Civil Rights sixties and seventies.
The Barnes & Noble Review
Jules Feiffer's had a pretty remarkable career over the past 60 years or so. After becoming the pioneering cartoonist Will Eisner's assistant as a teenager, he drew a long-running, ferocious comic strip for the Village Voice (initially called "Sick, Sick, Sick," later just "Feiffer"), wrote a series of plays, novels and screenplays, and eventually settled into creating children's books. This lively, digressive memoir details his evolution from skinny, put-upon Bronx Jewish kid to skinny, put-upon, world-renowned satirist, by way of stints on the open road and in the Army; it's the equivalent of listening to a terrific raconteur's well-polished anecdotes.
Like his characters, Feiffer's got a superiority complex that keeps colliding with an inferiority complex, and a knack for turning neurotic self-examination into comedy: an agonizing stomachache he describes abruptly disappearing when he finally admits out loud that he hates his mother could have come straight out of one of his early cartoons. Even after he's achieved fame, he seems hardly able to believe that he's in the same circle as other bold-face names -- there's a hilarious bit about watching Marlene Dietrich and Kenneth Tynan discuss "Papa" Hemingway ("Apparently, I was the only one at the table who knew I was a fraud").
After Backing Into Forward gets past the early-years-of-bitter-struggle part of Feiffer's story, he's got fewer stories to relate. The process of writing his 1967 play "Little Murders" at Yaddo is more or less the climax of the book; the subsequent forty years of his career are relegated to the book's final fifty pages. But the fun part of Backing Into Forward is less thedetails of Feiffer's work, and his brushes with other notables, than his keen-edged, blood-speckled wit, which he turns on himself as often as on the cruel world around him.
--Douglas WolkEditorials
David Carr
Reading Feiffer, you know where the truth lies because it is there on every page—resonant, self-lacerating and frequently hilarious…It is a good life he's had, and in Backing Into Forward, well told in every respect.—The New York Times Book Review
Michiko Kakutani
Backing into Forward provides the reader with a sharply evocative portrait of the author's youth in the Bronx, where he says he grew up a terrified, cowardly child, who "sidestepped arguments, fled confrontations, pedaled away from fistfights." And the book proves just as nimble at limning the literary world of Manhattan…when Backing Into Forward sticks to the story of his life and the evolution of his craft, it succeeds in sounding like the best of Mr. Feiffer's cartoons: funny, acerbic, subversive, fiercely attuned to the absurdities in his own life and in the country at large.—The New York Times
Kirkus Reviews
In characteristically wry tones, the celebrated cartoonist/playwright/illustrator looks back at a six-decade (and counting) working life, paying particular attention to his early influences. First among these are the comic strips and superhero comics that Feiffer (Passionella and Other Stories, 2006, etc.) read and copied in his Bronx youth; he pays warm tribute to their creators throughout his memoir. Second-and looming so large that she practically becomes the protagonist in major portions of the book-is his mother (his father rates only a few passing mentions), a notably insensitive figure who, he writes, "never failed to fail me." She did, however, wean her son of any need to rely on the approval or judgments of others in his work, politics or private life. With chapter heads like "Lucking Into The Zeitgeist" and "Heckle and Jeckel [sic] Meet Mike and Elaine," Feiffer retraces his career from a post-World War II apprenticeship in the studio of the legendary Will Eisner and the beginnings of a decades-long association with the Village Voice, to his establishment as a fixed star in the New York cultural firmament and a powerful voice of the New Left, to his most recent turn as a popular children's-book author. The author describes himself as a "hardworking, never-resting combination of talent and fraud," and he freely drops names and opinions ("Now, I had loved Annie Hall, and I used to like Woody"), which create a winning portrait of his literary and artistic milieu. Feiffer dishes up a self portrait notable for authentically sudden switches from self-effacement to touchy pride, righteous anger to bemusement, vulnerability to urbane loftiness. A touching, penetrating memoir-though fartoo sparsely illustrated.The New York Times Book Review
“Backing into Forward is . . . .youthful, full of insouciance, vanity and playfulness. While other accomplished men bronze their success or dip it in amber, Feiffer treats his own as one big wonderful caper.”
— David Carr
The Barnes & Noble Review
Jules Feiffer's had a pretty remarkable career over the past 60 years or so. After becoming the pioneering cartoonist Will Eisner's assistant as a teenager, he drew a long-running, ferocious comic strip for the Village Voice (initially called "Sick, Sick, Sick," later just "Feiffer"), wrote a series of plays, novels and screenplays, and eventually settled into creating children's books. This lively, digressive memoir details his evolution from skinny, put-upon Bronx Jewish kid to skinny, put-upon, world-renowned satirist, by way of stints on the open road and in the Army; it's the equivalent of listening to a terrific raconteur's well-polished anecdotes.
Like his characters, Feiffer's got a superiority complex that keeps colliding with an inferiority complex, and a knack for turning neurotic self-examination into comedy: an agonizing stomachache he describes abruptly disappearing when he finally admits out loud that he hates his mother could have come straight out of one of his early cartoons. Even after he's achieved fame, he seems hardly able to believe that he's in the same circle as other bold-face names -- there's a hilarious bit about watching Marlene Dietrich and Kenneth Tynan discuss "Papa" Hemingway ("Apparently, I was the only one at the table who knew I was a fraud").
After Backing Into Forward gets past the early-years-of-bitter-struggle part of Feiffer's story, he's got fewer stories to relate. The process of writing his 1967 play "Little Murders" at Yaddo is more or less the climax of the book; the subsequent forty years of his career are relegated to the book's final fifty pages. But the fun part of Backing Into Forward is less thedetails of Feiffer's work, and his brushes with other notables, than his keen-edged, blood-speckled wit, which he turns on himself as often as on the cruel world around him.
--Douglas Wolk