Explainers: Back to the '50's and Up to the Present http://www.popmatters.com/pm/feature/110884-explainers-back-to-the-50s-and-up-to-the-present/
[2 September 2009] If you were a Martian trying to figure out America in the second half of the 20th century, you could do worse than to start by reading Jules Feiffer's Village Voice cartoons. His strips for the Voice basically invented the genre of the adult comic, and that's adult in the "content which would interest a mature person who thinks about the world around them" sense rather than in the XXX Pussycat Theatre sense. He created a model for strips like Tom Tomorrow's "This Modern World" and David Rees' "Get Your War On" which use the medium of comics to deliver a satirical take on current events and the world around us. Feiffer took on the big public issues of the day. He was the first cartoonist to speak out against the war in Vietnam, he skewered Dwight Eisenhower for failing to support the Civil Rights movement, and pointed out the absurdities of the Cold War and the growing military-industrial complex. He tirelessly highlighted the misuse of language and the abuse of power, drawing on first-hand experience of the latter thanks to a stint in the U.S. Army. If Feiffer had a recurring theme, it was the refusal of those in power to confront reality, describe it clearly, and take action. Not content to bask in America's postwar prosperity, he always prodded his country to be better. But Feiffer was not always abrasive: when John F. Kennedy was assassinated, he ran a strip in which a child reads a fairy tale about a handsome prince who woke up a sleeping countrybut when the prince was assassinated they went right back to sleep. Feiffer developed a distinctive style incorporating a flexible number of "frames" which were usually just images separated by white space. They often featured a single individual speaking directly to the reader, like an actor delivering a monologue on stage. That may have been a metaphor for the isolation of modern man but also accommodated Feiffer's somewhat undeveloped artistic style: his strength was characterization and dialogue, not elaborate backgrounds or action sequences. Concentrating on dialogue let him display his knack for capturing how different types of people presented themselves in speech while subtly undermining their statements with his art. A memorable strip in 1963 featured a spokesman for the peace movement who's just discovered the reason for the movement's failure: they haven't marketed peace as a product. But they're going Madison Avenue now and as with any advertising campaign, it's important to find the right tone: "If we're going to make peace catch on as a product, we've got to make it as masculine as war!" How to accomplish this? By borrowing the language of the Pentagon, so peace councils become "Peace Commands" (Peace Comms for short) and peace workers become "Trouble Shooters" who run programs with themes like "Peace Escalation." He concludes: "Gentlemen, once we make the image of peace more warlike, our fund raising problems will be over! I'm sure congress will be happy to give us all we want." Fantagraphics is issuing Feiffer's Village Voice strips in bound volumes: the first to appear is Explainers: The Complete Village Voice Strips 1956-1966 which came out in May. Some of the material treated in these comics is past history: we no longer have to deal with Joe McCarthy or worry about the Soviet Union blowing us all to smithereens. But it's amazing and somewhat disheartening how contemporary many of them seem. In 1961 Feiffer drew a strip of a well-dressed man explaining the news business to the unwashed: publish diverting trivia and press releases and leave real reporting alone. "Free press? We're a nation of trade journals!" The only reason that's not totally current today is because we barely have any newspapers left worth paying attention to. Even the Village Voice, once a leader in investigative journalism, has today become just another free weekly from New Times Media. So criticizing newspapers may soon be a nostalgic pursuit tantamount to complaining about the scratchy sound from your record player or that the keys on your typewriter are sticking. Feiffer's greatest contribution may be his enduring portraits of notable types among his fellow private citizens. He views them through a rather jaundiced eye and of course they're studied in their neuroses (cultural note: neurosis is a basic emotion for New Yorkers) and totally full of themselves, but so vulnerable and human at the same time. He ceased cartooning for the Voice in 1997 but his characters live on in popular culture. There were Bernard and Huey, two masculine archetypes who would later turn up as Sandy (Art Garfunkel) and Jonathan (Jack Nicholson) in Mike Nichol's 1971 film Carnal Knowledge. Bernard was timid, reflective, and sensitive and never got the girl, while Huey was confident, oblivious and had to fight them off with a stick. And of course Bernard could never figure out what he was doing wrong, while the women who went home with Huey saw no contradiction in declaring that they like sensitive guys only to ditch him every time for the brute. Then there was the leotard-clad modern dancer perpetually offering a "dance to Spring" or a "dance to the loss of innocence" which always began optimistically and frequently ended with her twisted up like a pretzel or cowering in the corner. She's still with us, most recently as the subject of a production at the Jacob's Pillow Dance Festival in 2009. Pointless (and often self-imagined) personal competitions were a regular theme, and often music was the battleground. In those days it was jazz rather than indie rock but the spirit was exactly the same. A Feiffer beatnik confidently proclaims that jazz was invented by Steve Allen in 1955 and is taught at the New School. "If you don't like it, you'd better learn. It's the coming thing." In another strip, a middle-class gentleman is determined to puncture the pretensions of those who claim to be cool. It's become difficult since everyone has learned the "right" books to buy and the "right" records to listen to: yes there were recipes for hip non-conformity in the 1950's just as there are today. But not to fear, he's found the solution to unmasking the pseudo-hip: he sneaks over and turns on their radios! If they've left it on WQXR, they're busted! The take-home message: take care to change the setting on all your radio dials to an approve station before throwing a party, lest an undercover hipness detective be on the guest list. Here's a final image which should prove that the more things seem to change, the more they really don't. Two small boys inspect a crater. One explains that programs for public housing and school construction were proposed to boost employment, but were politically unacceptable as government interference with the free market. Then a bomb fell out of the sky, leaving a huge crater, and workers had to be hired to fill it in. So the solution to unemployment was found by accident: the government started a bomb-dropping program and put people to work filling in the craters. As the boy concludes, this leaves everyone happy because "Nobody complains about national defense." . --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Sixties-L" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sixties-l?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
