After the second war, now nearly sixty, he tried again, accepting a GI scholarship to dental school. This followed a very good war indeed, four years of unprecedented steady employment. He worked for the Navy Quartermaster Corps in Port Newark, New Jersey. Back to dental school he went, whizzing through, astonishing the younger students, a real gift for it, going far—until the blisters returned. The burns, the salves, the resignation from dental school, the resignation of hope.
She was our hope. My mother fed us and she clothed us. She worked and she suffered. Her shortcomings weren’t her fault. I was aware of them, of course, but how could Abe or I blame her?
I explained all this. Yes, Abe, I am aware of her bossiness, her thoughtlessness, her unfairness, her insensitivity … But Abe had to acknowledge her torturous past and present, her rising above it all, and oh, how hard she worked! And oh, her humor in spite of it all. The little comic verses she wrote, her impromptu songs and dances … How dare he blame my mother? She was a life force! Larger than life! These stomachaches of mine were not “psychological.” They weren’t “in my head,” if that’s what psychosomatic meant. That was all hooey! No, Abe, my pain could not be blamed on some idiotic theory. It hurt too much, it was real! Abe, I loved my mother! I loved my mother! I loved my mother!
My agitation had to be evident, but Abe would not back off. He quietly and stutteringly insisted that, based on a year of confidence I had shared with him (stupidly), I was furious with my mother but my guilt would not allow me to acknowledge it. My repressed, deeply implanted, deeply evasive guilt stifled the rage I felt. It would not allow it to surface. My mother had denied me an outlet in my head for my guilt, so it went south and lodged itself in my stomach. And that’s what caused my stomachaches.
Not true! Not true! Not true! Not true! Abe was driving me insane! Shut up with this phony psychoanalysis! Where did he learn this garbage? What was he, a doctor? Abe didn’t go to college any more than I did. Anyhow, who appointed him my psychiatrist? Shut the fuck up!
But Abe would not shut up. So to shut him up, to bring our stupid argument to a conclusion, I chose to employ judo on him, employ the weakness I had so effectively used in the past as a trump card: if I couldn’t get anywhere with confrontation, I’d go in the other direction, I’d pretend to surrender. “Okay, okay! I hate my mother!” I shouted.
And my stomachache went away.
“I hate my mother, I hate my mother!” I was feeling much better.
“I hate my mother, I hate her. I really do, I hate my mother!” I was growing giddy, euphoric. Abe beamed at me. How could he know? He must hate his mother. Then we were in this together: brothers who hated our mothers. Oh, happiness!
Jules at nineteen
ONE BASKET
At Eisner’s “shop” (as he called it) I’d begun as the lowest of the low and, for most of my first year, having observed a lot and been assigned a little bit of everything and having tried and failed at most of it, I remained the lowest of the low.
But I was not unhappy. I was accepted by my fellow workers, all, like Abe, in their late twenties or early thirties, all veterans of World War II, happy to be resuming their lives, but exactly what these lives were I never found out. Aside from Abe, they were a curiously impersonal bunch, cordial but just short of friendly: a brilliantly tight penciler, John Spranger, who drew better than Eisner but not nearly as stylishly; a lettering man, Sam Rosen, short, trim, and quiet, except for an occasional wisecrack; a background man, Jerry Grandinetti, also from the Bronx, just a couple of years older, trained in high school as an architectural draftsman and therefore a whiz in all the areas in which I was incompetent.
At seventeen and eighteen, I couldn’t draw a convincing chair or table or desk (it’s still hard). I was hopeless at vehicles of any kind: cars, trucks, trains, planes. And don’t talk to me about guns, the very staple of adventure comics, without which there are no heroes, no villains, no reasons to beat up bad guys. I drew guns as if they were made of melting butter.
Mushiness would describe the pure essence of my style at this time. Adventure comic art was programmed to look hard-edged, tough, combative. The best of this art was displayed by Eisner, Caniff, Frank Robbins in his strip Scorchy Smith, Jack Cole in his Plastic Man comic book, Joe Simon and Jack Kirby in Captain America and Boy Commandos, Irv Novick in The Shield.
There were others whom I admired and planned to grow up to be. But as I discovered in my first weeks in Eisner’s shop, I lacked every one of the basic skills to fulfill my ambitions. My line was soft where it should be hard, my figures amoebic when they should be overpowering. The wimpishness of the inner me stripped of dreams of grandeur emerged on paper with every line I drew. My style was self-effacing, a pretend style trying to look like the cartoonists I admired—this one, that one, the other—and monumentally failing to pull it off.
Here I was, seventeen years old at the beginning of what I knew was going to be a successful career. I didn’t have a single doubt. There was but one drawback: I was second-rate.
Where did it go wrong? Early on, the kids on the street salivated over my sidewalk art. At P.S. 77 and James Monroe High School I was considered nonpareil. And I still considered myself nonpareil when I didn’t leak doubts that I was a fraud. I was this hardworking, never-resting combination of talent and fraud. Both seemed equally valid judgments. My ambivalence was more of a comfort than a curse. My feelings of fraudulence marched in lockstep with my talent, so that when I screwed up, as I inevitably did, I was able to blame myself and forgive myself in the blink of an eye.
At seventeen at Eisner’s, leaving work each day, my tail between my legs, riding home on the subway, an ambivalent failure, I tried to quash the unwelcome perception that my golden years were behind me. What had gone wrong? At seven I was a hotshot. Don’t take my word for it, I won a medal! My kindergarten teacher at P.S. 77 submitted a classroom drawing to the annual art contest for public school children sponsored by the department store John Wanamaker. It was of movie cowboy Tom Mix holding a gun (made of butter), jailing two Indians. Now this was a citywide contest—citywide! And who won first prize? Jules, that’s who!
I was even better at eight and nine, and by fourteen I was making leaps and bounds. Come on, will you look at this pencil sketch I did in Max Wilkes’s freshman art class?!
I was at the top of the heap. No one else in my neighborhood came close! And I was acknowledged. It was the one skill I was acknowledged for. It meant a lot more than simply a facility for drawing pictures. It was my calling. Everything I needed to be to move from who I was that I couldn’t tolerate was tied up in making this famous cartoonist thing work.
That’s what I was trying to say to my uncle Eugene at our occasional downtown lunches when he cautioned me against putting all my eggs in one basket: “Don’t put all your eggs in one basket,” he’d say. And I would reply, “I only have one basket.” Whether I could draw anymore or not, I was committed. If one basket wasn’t enough for my one and only egg, I was done for.
The question was, if I was so good once, why was I so pitiful now? Over the years, I’ve wondered about it: how did I lose my talent after fourteen? And the answer I’ve come up with is self-mutilation.
At an early stage, I drew my own ideas, right or wrong, good or bad, and I executed them haphazardly, the only point being not the quality of the line but its presence. I penciled, I put down my substance on paper, and it was more important to have it down than to have it right. And if it wasn’t right, then the next drawing was going to be right or closer to right, but anyway, who cared? I was having a ball. And since I was the one who defined the standards, for a long time there were no serious problems. In this early stage of development the conversation on paper was entirely with myself. It was ideal.
Then I reached a stage, and an age, when it wasn’t enough to look like me anymore. There were masters out there who, with a little effort, I could come to look like. I became more demanding of myself. My goals shifted. The c
onversation stopped being only about me. It turned into a flirtation with my role model. I courted the one I loved, the cartoonist that I planned someday to equal or surpass, but not yet. The stage I was entering was where I worked my heart out not to best him but to be him, to make my art look exactly like his.
Unwittingly, believing with all my heart that this was progress, I began to divest myself of myself. Solipsism was replaced by self-effacement. Other, better cartoonists occupied this universe, so first I admired them, then I envied them, then I became them, then I replaced them. That was my master plan.
And as I changed from who I was to who Alex Raymond was, my work seemed to take on panache, dimension, a pretense of craft. I studied my Alex Raymond self and it was a vast improvement over my Jules Feiffer self. So I sank entirely into Raymond, except when I was being Caniff, mixed with a little Eisner, mixed with a little Roy Crane. I didn’t use my betters as reference points to build a style of my own. No, I stole their drawings, line for line, fold for fold, shadow for shadow. And the more I distanced myself from what made me love being a cartoonist in the first place, the more professional I thought I was.
I had lost everything that made me choose this as a life’s work, lost the energy, the quirkiness, the sense of humor. I had willingly hired myself on as a hack. And looking over my samples, which had nothing to do with who or what I was, I thought, “Jesus, I’m getting good, soon I’ll be the best!”
My best was brought to its knees in Eisner’s shop. There are certain basic skills that go with being a competent illustrator of adventure art: one is a knowledge of anatomy proficient enough to let you draw figures in action, hulking, muscular men chasing down and beating the crap out of one another.
I more or less knew my anatomy. In the midforties, I gave in to my mother’s urgings and signed up for a drawing class at the Art Students League. I studied under a legendary teacher, Robert Beverly Hale (he later became curator of American paintings and sculpture at the Metropolitan Museum). Hale’s appearance was pure Brahmin: well over six feet, he strolled the classroom in lawyerlike three-piece pinstripes, gently taking the charcoal out of my fingers to correct the drawing of a nude model I was making a mess of. By dint of his guidance I came to learn and understand the musculature of the human body.
He taught by prodding me benignly, good-naturedly, never letting me feel incompetent, as I certainly was. And somehow his Harvard Yard drawl gave comfort. If he spent so much time with me, clueing me in to perceive the obvious, then I must show promise.
So I knew how to draw the human figure, shakily but passably. But I got away with it only in pencil. I was hopeless at inking the human figure or anything else. Adventure comic inkers work in brush, finishing off a penciler’s tight rendering with a thick and thin brush line that gleams on the page with a shoeshinelike sheen.
This brush line of fluidity, grace, and infinite slickness was, despite hours of practice, outside my manageable skills. My brush line didn’t shine, it clunked. It wasn’t thick and thin, it was splotchy and ham-handed. And I was unable to master layout. I well knew that a page of six to nine panels had to grab the reader, one panel at a time, while the design of the complete page required the look of an action movie on paper. But my layouts failed that test. Rather than move across the page dramatically, my figures hung out leadenly in their panels as if standing on a street corner, drawn by a hand held down by iron weights.
Eisner tried me on backgrounds, so that he might move Jerry Grandinetti up to figures. But here too I was hopeless, worse than with the human figure. My inking of figures, while short of proficient, had a touch of pizzazz, a hint that sometime in a distant future I might know what I was doing. But when I tried backgrounds—city street scenes, lampposts, waterfront docks with tugboats, suspension bridges, automobiles—my ineptitude was pathetic, leading one to think that I had dropped in from another century and had never seen a skyscraper, a lamppost, a bridge, an automobile …
At $10 a week (which I managed to work up to) Eisner could not afford to fire me. In time, I found my niche as a minimalist: half gofer, half janitor to the eight-page Spirit section. I ruled lines for borders, drew scalloped balloons and tails that held the dialogue, inked in shadows and silhouettes that were indicated by X marks on the page. I erased, whited out mistakes, pasted up … I was not unhappy.
I surveyed my tasks in the aggregate and imagined this as a journey in progress. Eventually, Eisner let me color photocopies (called silver prints) of the entire Spirit section. Thus, every week I was in charge of how my favorite feature appeared in syndication in a hundred newspapers: the Newark Star-Ledger, the Philadelphia Record, the Chicago Sun-Times, the Detroit News, and my local paper, the Parkchester Review. Every Sunday, affluent readers—at least in my terms—in Parkchester opened their Sunday papers and read the Spirit section, never dreaming that the dramatic display of color in the strip they were reading was the work of a boy a year out of high school, who came from the other side of the tracks in their very borough: clearly a precursor to fame.
Although I was employed as a drudge, my heart remained in fandom. Eisner had so much to say in his work, drew so brilliantly, worked in stark and vivid combinations of density, with such quickness of hand … a hand with which I’d clearly never compete. But I never seriously thought of competing with Eisner. I was working, almost giddily, as a total loser. My lack of qualifications didn’t trouble me but rather seemed to be a basic given that dogged so many of my endeavors since earliest childhood. Really, who else flunked shop at P.S. 77?
Shop was where you learned to use the tools of carpentry to fashion handicrafts such as lamps, modest bookcases, model sailboats. I had been able to build nothing, demonstrating an almost magical gift for making the simplest task hard. My shop teacher, Mr. Margon, was convinced that I was out to make a fool of him. No kid that good at drawing pictures could be that bad with his hands in shop class. But the truth, then and now, is that I can’t build anything, can fix almost nothing, don’t understand how most things work, don’t have a clue as to why a car moves forward when I press down on the pedal on the right. Conversely, it makes perfect sense that when I go into reverse, the logic of my shortcomings demands that I crash into whatever stands behind me.
Eisner’s original black-and-white brush drawings glowed on the page. They didn’t need the colors I added. The use of blacks spotted in vibrant swatches over six or eight panels had a charged electrical effect. Sitting in his studio, at my own drawing table, surrounded by pages in all stages of development, I marveled, virtually salivated, over the quality of the work that slid past me before I could totally fuck it up. It was a miracle undeterred by the staying power of my incompetence.
I was seventeen—what did I know?—but I thought this stuff was art. As Caniff’s work was art, as Roy Crane’s and Segar’s (Popeye) and Frank King’s (Gasoline Alley) and Cliff Sterrett’s (Polly and Her Pals) and George Herriman’s (Krazy Kat), and, just a few years later, Walt Kelly’s in his monumental Pogo. These men, products of an old newspaper ethic, snorted when the term artist was applied to them, which in fact it seldom was until I and a few others of my generation started applying it. They were star players in a game made up of high-spirited drunks, carousers, and practical jokers. They identified more with Hecht and MacArthur’s Front Page than they did with the loftiness that attended art galleries. Their definition of the work they turned out was “tomorrow’s garbage.” They devoted their energy, brilliance, and passion to a product that, once completed, they enjoyed demeaning. Anything less was sissyish, an offense to their manhood.
Eisner cheerfully derided my use of the term art in regard to his Spirit section. Not long out of the army, where he was stationed in Washington and edited and drew technical magazines of his own devising that served as humorous training guides for GIs, he more and more saw his future in noncomic publishing. In his early thirties, he was now in the process of redefining himself with a fishing magazine in the works, plans for a baseball ma
gazine, and other schemes to move him at least partly away from his drawing table to a management desk.
As a result of this “maturation” process, it seemed to me that he began to lose interest in the stories he wrote. As a big fan of the prewar Spirit, where the stories, I thought, were as hypnotic and powerful as the art, I began to feel, a year or so into the job, disappointment in the drift of Eisner’s scripts. His earliest Spirit adventures displayed a gift for compacting into eight short pages an abundance of character, incident, conflict, surprise twists, and happy resolution, all combined with humor, suspense, charm, and gritty realism. It was rich stuff for a boy fan, picking up a new Spirit section every Sunday, to find a delirious mix of O. Henry, Ring Lardner, and Guy de Maupassant infused into stories drawn with noirish RKO, Warner Brothers overtones.
But into my second year with Eisner, while I continued to find the art as exciting as ever, it seemed to me that the stories were losing their zing. Will’s return from the army introduced a new density in both story and art. The Spirit became darker and funnier, wilder, and yet more serious. But by mid-1947, it wasn’t what it had been. I found myself increasingly let down by Will’s story writing. He was my hero, I was an idealist, I was now eighteen, so what was to stop me from bringing his loss of quality up for discussion?
This is more or less how I approached the subject: “Gee, Will, the Spirit stories you used to write were terrific, so much better than they are now. Why don’t you go back to writing them as good as you used to?”
Backing Into Forward Page 6
