In his new memoir, Backing Into Forward, Jules Feiffer describes channeling dyslexia, anxiety, and a troubled childhood into a prolific career. "There's some brain damage," he jokes, "but I've never met a cartoonist who isn't quirky or weird in some ways." Fortunately, the Oscar-, Pulitzer-, Obie-, and Polk-winning author and illustrator's quirks remain in full bloom. The 81-year-old is still cranking out political cartoons and working on kids' books with his daughter and—after a 50-year hiatus—The Phantom Tollbooth author Norton Juster (their new book, The Odius Ogre, was released in September). Not that he's gone soft; his satire remains as sharp as ever: "The grown-ups, or the ones I choose to go after, deserve everything they get."
Mother Jones: I should start by confessing that I named my son after Milo in The Phantom Tollbooth and, like a lot of people, became familiar with you through your children's books. How does it feel to have that be the way into people's hearts—the softer side of Jules?
Jules Feiffer: [Laughs.] As long as they pay attention, why should I care? I love doing the children's books as much as anything else I've done. As a matter of fact, just coming back from the audiologist because the hearing aids I've just spent $7,000 on weren't worth a goddam thing, I wrote new picture book on the bus just to cheer myself up.
MJ: Do the kids' books feel like they're on a continuum to the very dark social satire that you've done?
JF: No, no. It's a different part of me. Until kids' books, I was never able to show the more playful side, the sillier side, and just be out-and-out goofy.
MJ: In your book, you say that the best cartoons or comics are when one person does all the writing and the drawing. I found it interesting in context of The Phantom Tollbooth, because I can't imagine a better pairing of text and image.
JF: Well Norton [Juster] and I have for the first time in 50 years just done another book, which is coming out in the fall. It's a picture book for younger kids, called The Odious Ogre, which will be in color. What I've tried to do is kind of get inside the author's head and do a presentation that he or she might want to do if they could draw. It's all about telling the story, and telling the story from the inside. What I've always done with the cartoons, in terms of my art, is try to get inside the characters I'm talking about. You know, the character who is speaking, is showing us through body language and through facial expression what he or she is thinking, what the struggle is that's going on, and visualize it as much as verbalize it, and that's what I try to do in the kids' books.
MJ: Your kids' books do such a wonderful job of capturing loneliness and other emotional states that we think of, falsely, as adult concepts.
JF: I couldn't actually write kids books and go on the attack the way I do with grownups. The grownups, or the ones I choose to go after, deserve everything they get. But kids are in ongoing need of support, and they get various versions of it from grownups which aren't legitimate—a grownup's version of what we think you should have. We tell you what creativity is, and we even tell you what you're thinking. What I try to get at in my books is akin to that sense that Holden Caulfield felt when he reads a writer and wants to call him up in the middle of the night—to be a friend to the reader.
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