http://www.popmatters.com/pm/feature/110884-explainers-back-to-the-50s-and-up-to-the-present/
[2 September 2009]
If you were a Martian trying to figure out America in the second half
of the 20th century, you could do worse than to start by reading
Jules Feiffer's Village Voice cartoons. His strips for the Voice
basically invented the genre of the adult comic, and that's adult in
the "content which would interest a mature person who thinks about
the world around them" sense rather than in the XXX Pussycat Theatre
sense. He created a model for strips like Tom Tomorrow's "This Modern
World" and David Rees' "Get Your War On" which use the medium of
comics to deliver a satirical take on current events and the world around us.
Feiffer took on the big public issues of the day. He was the first
cartoonist to speak out against the war in Vietnam, he skewered
Dwight Eisenhower for failing to support the Civil Rights movement,
and pointed out the absurdities of the Cold War and the growing
military-industrial complex. He tirelessly highlighted the misuse of
language and the abuse of power, drawing on first-hand experience of
the latter thanks to a stint in the U.S. Army.
If Feiffer had a recurring theme, it was the refusal of those in
power to confront reality, describe it clearly, and take action. Not
content to bask in America's postwar prosperity, he always prodded
his country to be better. But Feiffer was not always abrasive: when
John F. Kennedy
was assassinated, he ran a strip in which a child reads a fairy tale
about a handsome prince who woke up a sleeping countrybut when the
prince was assassinated they went right back to sleep.
Feiffer developed a distinctive style incorporating a flexible number
of "frames" which were usually just images separated by white space.
They often featured a single individual speaking directly to the
reader, like an actor delivering a monologue on stage. That may have
been a metaphor for the isolation of modern man but also accommodated
Feiffer's somewhat undeveloped artistic style: his strength was
characterization and dialogue, not elaborate backgrounds or action
sequences. Concentrating on dialogue let him display his knack for
capturing how different types of people presented themselves in
speech while subtly undermining their statements with his art.
A memorable strip in 1963 featured a spokesman for the peace movement
who's just discovered the reason for the movement's failure: they
haven't marketed peace as a product. But they're going
Madison Avenue
now and as with any advertising campaign, it's important to find the
right tone: "If we're going to make peace catch on as a product,
we've got to make it as masculine as war!" How to accomplish this? By
borrowing the language of the Pentagon, so peace councils become
"Peace Commands" (Peace Comms for short) and peace workers become
"Trouble Shooters" who run programs with themes like "Peace
Escalation." He concludes: "Gentlemen, once we make the image of
peace more warlike, our fund raising problems will be over! I'm sure
congress will be happy to give us all we want."
Fantagraphics is issuing Feiffer's Village Voice strips in bound
volumes: the first to appear is Explainers: The Complete Village
Voice Strips 1956-1966 which came out in May. Some of the material
treated in these comics is past history: we no longer have to deal
with Joe McCarthy or worry about the Soviet Union blowing us all to
smithereens. But it's amazing and somewhat disheartening how
contemporary many of them seem.
In 1961 Feiffer drew a strip of a well-dressed man explaining the
news business to the unwashed: publish diverting trivia and press
releases and leave real reporting alone. "Free press? We're a nation
of trade journals!" The only reason that's not totally current today
is because we barely have any newspapers left worth paying attention
to. Even the Village Voice, once a leader in investigative
journalism, has today become just another free weekly from New Times
Media. So criticizing newspapers may soon be a nostalgic pursuit
tantamount to complaining about the scratchy sound from your record
player or that the keys on your typewriter are sticking.
Feiffer's greatest contribution may be his enduring portraits of
notable types among his fellow private citizens. He views them
through a rather jaundiced eye and of course they're studied in their
neuroses (cultural note: neurosis is a basic emotion for New Yorkers)
and totally full of themselves, but so vulnerable and human at the
same time. He ceased cartooning for the Voice in 1997 but his
characters live on in popular culture.
There were Bernard and Huey, two masculine archetypes who would later
turn up as Sandy (Art Garfunkel) and Jonathan (Jack Nicholson) in
Mike Nichol's 1971 film Carnal Knowledge. Bernard was timid,
reflective, and sensitive and never got the girl, while Huey was
confident, oblivious and had to fight them off with a stick. And of
course Bernard could never figure out what he was doing wrong, while
the women who went home with Huey saw no contradiction in declaring
that they like sensitive guys only to ditch him every time for the brute.
Then there was the leotard-clad modern dancer perpetually offering a
"dance to Spring" or a "dance to the loss of innocence" which always
began optimistically and frequently ended with her twisted up like a
pretzel or cowering in the corner. She's still with us, most recently
as the subject of a production at the Jacob's Pillow Dance Festival in 2009.
Pointless (and often self-imagined) personal competitions were a
regular theme, and often music was the battleground. In those days it
was jazz rather than indie rock but the spirit was exactly the same.
A Feiffer beatnik confidently proclaims that jazz was invented by
Steve Allen in 1955 and is taught at the New School. "If you don't
like it, you'd better learn. It's the coming thing."
In another strip, a middle-class gentleman is determined to puncture
the pretensions of those who claim to be cool. It's become difficult
since everyone has learned the "right" books to buy and the "right"
records to listen to: yes there were recipes for hip non-conformity
in the 1950's just as there are today. But not to fear, he's found
the solution to unmasking the pseudo-hip: he sneaks over and turns on
their radios! If they've left it on WQXR, they're busted! The
take-home message: take care to change the setting on all your radio
dials to an approve station before throwing a party, lest an
undercover hipness detective be on the guest list.
Here's a final image which should prove that the more things seem to
change, the more they really don't. Two small boys inspect a crater.
One explains that programs for public housing and school construction
were proposed to boost employment, but were politically unacceptable
as government interference with the free market. Then a bomb fell out
of the sky, leaving a huge crater, and workers had to be hired to
fill it in. So the solution to unemployment was found by accident:
the government started a bomb-dropping program and put people to work
filling in the craters. As the boy concludes, this leaves everyone
happy because "Nobody complains about national defense."
.
No comments:
Post a Comment