The Great Comic Book Heroes
As you might know, the American cartoonist and satirist Jules Feiffer died last month, at the age of 95 in a New York village just north of Cooperstown.
Feiffer is known for many things. My daughter, just this year in school, read the famous kids’ book, The Phantom Tollbooth, wherein Feiffer’s art accompanies words by Norton Juster.
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His comic strip, “Feiffer,” ran for decades in the Village Voice. He also drew strips for Rolling Stone, Playboy, and the New Yorker, among other publications.
Were this not enough, he also wrote screenplays—Carnal Knowledge (1971), dir. Mike Nichols; Little Murders (also 1971), dir. Alan Arkin; and 1980’s Popeye, dir., Robert Altman.
But I knew him first from his work as a critic and commentator on the comic-book medium. Feiffer got his start in publishing as a teenager in the studio of Will Eisner, creator of the Sunday-funnies feature “The Spirit,” showcasing a masked but nonpowered avenger of injustice, and writer/artist of the 1978 graphic novel A Contract with God, detailing the lives of Jewish characters living in derelict NYC tenements.
In 1965, Feiffer published The Great Comic Book Heroes, one of the earliest works of comics criticism. The book consisted mostly of reprints of stories from the 1930s and ‘40s, from DC Comics, Marvel (actually, one of its precursors, but let’s not split hairs), and a variety of other publishers. At a time when it was very difficult to find anthologies of early comics material, the book reprinted the earliest exploits of Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, Captain America, the Submariner, Plastic Man, and Eisner’s the Spirit.
I first saw this book in a classroom in my elementary school, probably in fourth grade, probably around 1978. If I’m writing about it 47 years later, you can guess that it stuck with me. First, the comic-book medium had evolved greatly between the Thirties and the Seventies—art styles, coloring choices, and lettering design all combined to make the look of Golden Age comics really pop out to my eyes trained on Bronze Age comics.
Also, the WWII-era versions of heroes such as Green Lantern and the Flash were actually different dudes with different origins and costumes from the guys fighting criminals in the Justice League comic that ran in 1978. This was exciting to me.
Even seeing superheroes in a war setting was unusual. DC’s heroes famously kept out of the European theater, but there was Captain America, taking drugs to pump himself up to smash Nazis.
The book presented heroes I had never heard of or was barely familiar with, namely the WWII-era Human Torch, the Submariner, and the Spirit.
Finally, this book reprinted the first appearance of the Joker, and what a horrifying creep this guy was when introduced. I was used to seeing a kindly and amusing prankster wearing red, white, and green paint over a mustache, trading barbs with Adam West, doing nothing more harmful than stealing jewels or bank deposits.
The guy who first appeared in 1940 was an unrepentant murderer, and we expect this now, after years of Jack Nicholson and Heath Ledger and Joaquin Phoenix all highlighting the vicious psychopathy of the character, but in 1978, this interpretation was new to me. Seeing the rictus grins on the corpses of his victims was nightmarish.
The Great Comic Book Heroes opened to me a new room in the vast mansion that is comics history, and it dramatically expanded my understanding of what the medium could accomplish.
I am a lifelong fan of comic books and strips, and I owe a great deal of that to this book.
Happy Tuesday.