Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #258275 in Books
• Published on: 2008-09-17
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 528 pages

Synopsis
A first of four volumes collecting the cartoonist's "Village Voice" strips reflects the political and cultural arenas of the mid-twentieth century and tackles a wide range of topics, from the Eisenhower administration and McCarthyism to the Cold War and the impending civil rights era.

Customer Reviews

Intellectual angst
I think Fantagraphics should be congratulated for publishing all of Feiffer's Village Voice strips. This first book of 568 pages (with three more editions to come) covers his first VV strip in October 1956 to December 1966 with one week to a page.

Gary Groth's short essay, at the front of the book, puts Feiffer into the context of the times and it seems the times were just right for his wry observations of life in the US: postwar affluence, the Organisation Man consumer culture, the military/industrial complex and popular media. The other subject that Feiffer devotes many strips to are male-female relationships, frequently expressed from the male point-of-view with his two regulars: Bernard (timid, insecure) and Hue (confident, scores all the time). You'll see throughout the strips though that he's an equal opportunity satirist because he attacks everyone equally.

Feiffer's drawing style in the first few weeks with the Voice seem to me rather uncertain and varied with sometimes a thick line style, defined panels with plenty of black and speech bubbles or entire black shapes with white figures but by late fifty-seven he had settled down to his unique rendering of figures with captions frequently text-wrapped round them. His faces always seem to display the emotions reflected in the words.

The book is a rather handsome production, landscape to accommodate the strips with each one month/week/year dated and surprisingly a three page index (Nixon appears five times, Johnson fourteen and East Meadow, Long Island once) I would only fault the use of Roman numerals for the first eighteen pages with Groth's essay. Who uses these in the digital age!

Feiffer won the 1986 Pulitzer Prize for cartooning and with this book of ten years of Village Voice strips its easy to see why. I've enjoyed reading a few each day and I'm getting life explained...sort of.