Jules Feiffer’s Explainers, which collects his Village Voice comic strips from 1956 to 1966, made the cover of the prestigious New York Times Book Review on Sunday. David Kamp’s rave review of the 546-page hardcover cartoon collection, published by Fantagraphics Books, covers two full pages and includes reproductions of three classic Feiffer cartoons.
Kamp refers to the Explainers collection as “a welcome reintroduction—or introduction, to the uninitiated—to a great cartoonist who boldly bent his medium to adult purposes long before it was commonplace to do so.” Kamp discusses Feiffer’s influence on younger cartoonists as diverse as Garry Trudeau, Berkeley Breathed, and Art Spiegelman.
According to Kamp “Feiffer’s basic scheme was to mine the humor of social and political blather—to show, in a funny way, how people talk and talk but never connect.”
As the cover story in the NYT Book Review, Explainers will now immediately have a much higher profile, leading to increased sales in retailers that take advantage of the publicity.
