Backing Into Forward

by Jules Feiffer

  For my children, my grandchild, my future grandchildren—

  Success is nothing to sneeze at but failure, too,

  offers great possibilities.

  And always remember, do not let your judges define you.

  “Unlearn”

  —LINCOLN STEFFENS

  Part One

  GUNSLINGER

  BOY CARTOONIST

  Food was out to get me. Food devoured me with every mouthful I took. I chewed for minutes without being able to swallow. I gagged, spit up into a napkin, then secretly shook the remains into the garbage when my mother’s back was turned. She didn’t suspect.

  Much in the manner of immigrant Jewish mothers of her time and circumstance, my mother placed all her hopes and dreams on me. She wanted me to be big and healthy. But I wouldn’t cooperate. I was small for my age and underweight for any age. I could count my own ribs when I stripped down to my shorts.

  “It’s good for you,” was her unpersuasive catch phrase as she tried to shovel noodle pudding down my throat. “It’s your favorite,” she insisted against the evidence of my tightly sealed lips. “I have no time for this,” she pleaded.

  She had anointed me, the only male child in the family, to succeed where she had not. But at the rate I was going, I had three months to live. Or so my mother worried. I knew I’d do fine if I could only get away from her noodle pudding. I despised her noodle pudding.

  My mother had failed to live up to her early promise as a fashion designer. It was never clear why her career had gone flat, but what was clear, much too clear, was how she toiled, night and day, over her drawing table stationed in a corner of our living room, sandwiched between the piano no one knew how to play and the bookcase stacked with Russian, French, and English novels (read by my father) and uplifting essays by Emerson and others (studied by my mother). She drew her fashion sketches, cloaks and suits they were called, in pencil and lightly tinted watercolor. Three days a week she packed them up and subwayed down to the Garment District on Seventh Avenue, where she peddled them door-to-door to dress manufacturers. Each sketch earned her three dollars. Since my father perennially failed at business and his various other jobs didn’t last that long, it was my mother’s three-dollar sketches that brought us through hard times.

  She performed dutifully the roles of breadwinner, wife, and mother, unsought obligations inflicted on her by a bad choice in husbands and the Great Depression. She was said to be good at design, but how was I to know? Except for superheroes in tights and capes, I was indifferent to fashion. But from an early age I was forced to observe how absent pleasure was from her work, how often she mentioned the strain, her headaches, her throbbing temples—

  I was meant to grow up to right the wrong of her stalled career, undermined by my grandparents, who prodded her into marrying Dave Feiffer. So much had been taken from her, small wonder the anxiety she brought to raising me. Her offers of food felled me like a battering ram. She pushed, cajoled, browbeat, destroyed my appetite for the very things she offered. “Eat, it’s delicious,” “You’ll love this, you know you’ll love this.” This is not the job she wanted. What she wanted was to get on with the day, get back to her drawing board, dive deep into the world of fashion, which, though it offered few rewards, remained her single escape from this marriage she was drafted into. Her aim was to stuff me at least to the extent that I wasn’t a physical embarrassment to the neighbors, a reproach to her reputation as a mother, forty pounds at seven years, my reminder of her failure.

  I had my appetites, not for food but for comics. I didn’t see that food had anything in it to sustain me. I ate only because I wanted to be a good boy. I wanted to keep my mother happy. Not that I, or anyone else, could keep her happy. But more about not keeping my mother happy later.

  Comics: I ate them, I breathed them, I thought about them day and night. I learned to read only so that I could read comics. Nothing else was worth the effort. Marginalized from every aspect of the Bronx world I inhabited, my only escape was a life of escapism: reading comics, going to movies, listening to radio serials and favored comedians—Jack Armstrong, I Love a Mystery, Fibber McGee and Molly, Charlie McCarthy, Jack Benny, Burns and Allen—each transporting me out of real life into a totally impossible fantasy reality that I bought as a metaphor for my future.

  My alternate dream was to someday work myself into the ranks of the great cartoonists. Getting to the top, where I’d be invited to hang out with Milton Caniff of Terry and the Pirates, Will Eisner of The Spirit, Roy Crane of Wash Tubbs and Captain Easy, E. C. Segar of Popeye, Raeburn Van Buren of Abbie an’ Slats, Alex Raymond of Flash Gordon, Al Capp of Li’l Abner …

  These men were heroes! Brilliance in four-paneled daily strips and full-page gloriously colored Sunday extravaganzas that they routinely created. I loved the look, the dazzling interplay of words and pictures that leaped off the comics page at me, a preferred universe to the one I was mired in. But not for long. If I had anything to say about it. I lived in circumstances where I was poor (a drawback in real life, an incitement to high adventure and rags to riches in comics), where I was small and powerless, so inadequate that I couldn’t bat, throw, or catch a ball (a disaster in real life, but in comics a self-imposed limitation that hid my superpowers from evildoers).

  I could have used superpowers. If you grew up poor in the Bronx during the Great Depression, missing out on the joys of boyhood as others knew them—baseball, football, basketball (fun for others, failed challenges for me)—then what was your way out? A fantasy of fame and fortune as a cartoonist! So went my exit strategy.

  The scenario begins with my own Bronx version of a movie Western shootout. It’s Saturday. It’s summer. It’s Stratford Avenue in the Soundview area of the East Bronx. Five- and six-story dreary brick apartment houses line the streets. Brown, gray, and rust are the colors that dominate. On the corner of Stratford and Westchester, the Lexington Avenue El clatters by, noticeably noisiest in the middle of the night. Kaminkowitz’s drugstore is on the corner of Stratford, next to Horowitz’s vegetable store, next to a vacant lot. I worked at Kaminkowitz’s as a delivery boy when I was eleven and twelve.

  Pensky’s candy store is across the street, the near corner. Pensky was important to my life because his store was where I scanned comic books before buying them. Pensky also had a soda fountain and gum ball machines and, in a booth at the back of the store, one of the few phones on the block. If my mother got a call, Pensky sent a kid (in the store for a candy or a soda) up Stratford to our house, 1235, to call my mother to the window. “Mrs. Feiffer, you’re wanted on the phone!” the kid shouted from the street.

  My mother walked three flights down, meandered to the store (she had two speeds: slow and slower), ambled into Pensky’s, said, “I have a phone call, Mr. Pensky?” as if it had to be a mistake, thanked Pensky correctly but without feeling (he was a tradesman, she was a snob), and then, no matter how hot the day, closed herself off in the phone booth to take the call.

  My mother minded her own business and wanted Pensky to mind his. And her children to mind ours. She kept secrets, who knew how many and of what gravity? Secrets about finances, about family, about family and finances, about disappointments, about betrayals, about debt and more debt, about so much that she couldn’t let on, could only hint at: “You’re not old enough. I’ll tell you when you’re old enough.”

  My mother’s secrets gave depth to her rigidity. And God knows, for a woman who started out a blithe spirit, the abuses that broke but did not bend her succeeded in alienating all three of her children, who were incipient blithe spirits themselves.

  She was not affectionate. Not a hugger, a holder, a kisser, a squeezer, or a pincher. She didn’t go in for bodily contact, c
ertainly not with my father. I’ve suspected for a long time that mine was a virginal birth. I can’t prove it. But in my life I’ve never been in much of a position to prove anything. My motto has been: Even if you have to make it up, move on. That’s just one of my mottos. My other motto is: Duck!

  So I’m back in the Bronx in the 1930s, which I’m told was a fine place to be if you were a different kind of poor Jewish boy than I was. I hear, now and again, from Bronx nostalgia associations and Web sites set up for expats who remember their Bronx childhoods fondly, romantically, a bit misty-eyed. That’s not how I remember it: Walking down three flights of narrow stairs from Apartment 2-F at 1235 Stratford. I have a piece of chalk in my hand instead of a gun. But walking down those stairs and out the door into the sunlight is a little like walking down a lone Western street through the swinging doors of a saloon. Gunfighters everywhere—they know they can take me. I know they can take me. My three-year-old sister, Alice, who worships the ground I walk on, even she knows they can take me.

  But of course it’s not a saloon, it’s the very block I live on. My enemies are armed not with guns but with balls and baseball gloves and broomsticks. And they know when they see me walking out my front door (if they do see me, which I doubt), that I am of absolutely no consequence. I can’t hit, I can’t throw, I can’t catch.

  I was missing a basic Bronx gene, the ball-playing gene. It seemed that every kid had it but me. Later, John F. Kennedy was to famously say, “Life is not fair.” He was never to know that, a generation earlier, I had proved his point over and over again.

  Anyhow, back to the scenario: I have chalk, that’s my weapon. They have balls and sticks and gloves. They outsize, outweigh, and outgun me. I don’t know what I’m doing out here. I wouldn’t be here, but my mother made me. “You can’t stay in the house and draw all day.” “You need fresh air.” “Go out and play.”

  Play? If she paid attention to anything but her own rules, she’d know that I can’t play. I am physically at odds with sports. My body has been fitted with a hand that can draw but can’t catch or field a ball. She is sending her only son out to die.

  Hence the piece of chalk in my hand. At seven I have begun to strategize. If no one else, not my mother, not my father, is aware enough to look after my survival, then it’s up to me. Chalk is my weapon, the sidewalk my battleground. While they, the other, the enemy, the kids with size and muscles and coordination, take over the street, a dozen or more, batting balls, fielding base hits in and around traffic, I establish my terrain, down on my knees on the sidewalk. I draw in large, brash strokes. I don’t know what it is until I’ve laid down the first lines. It’s … Popeye. Next I do Wimpy. I do a better Popeye than a Wimpy, but it beats any Wimpy these jocks can draw.

  Popeye by Jules, age seven

  One or two of the athletes wander over. They trot off their turf, the street, over to my gallery on the sidewalk.

  “Hey, it’s Popeye.”

  Duh.

  “Can you draw Dick Tracy?”

  I can and I do. And I am fast. They are startled by my speed.

  “Can you draw Tom Mix?”

  Tom Mix is a favorite cowboy star of the thirties. I draw a ten-gallonhatted gunslinger firing with both barrels. It doesn’t matter that it doesn’t look like Tom Mix. The growing crowd is responding to me, the fastest chalk in the West.

  Of course, after five or ten minutes they are bored and go back to their game. Besides, I have a limited repertoire, only so many cowboys and cartoon characters that I know how to draw or fake draw. But it doesn’t matter, I’ve made my point, I’ve taken my ground: the sidewalk. And on that sidewalk I’ve carved out a niche for myself in the neighborhood. I’m the artist.

  I’ve won respect if not acceptance. Admiration if not friendship. I’ve drawn myself into the pecking order. It’s an early use—perhaps my earliest—of a basic survivor’s technique: backing into recognition.

  I figured out what the jocks couldn’t do that I could. I could draw. They couldn’t. I used their lack of talent to prove that even though I wasn’t a ball player I was visible, I existed! Inadvertently, I had stumbled onto the use of comics as judo. Talk about epiphanies.

  Jules at nine

  COMICS CARAVAN

  I have before me a slightly soiled but amazingly intact copy of the Comics Caravan, dated July 1940. I was eleven when I wrote and drew it, dating my creations just as the real comic books in Pensky’s candy store were dated, months ahead of their appearance. I did my best to imitate the pros, so my Comics Caravan dated for July was probably drawn in April. Comic books were sold at sixty-four pages for a dime. My comics, drawn in pencil, were also sixty-four pages but I notice the price on the cover is nine cents, so either I saw myself as a penny less competent than the pros or I was trying to undersell them.

  A ribbon running under the title of the Comics Caravan reads, “Lightning, Fast Action, Adventure.” And on the cover we see a masked superhero, the Dial Man, slugging a knife-wielding bad guy, while unbeknownst to him, a huge packing crate hurtles toward him from above, a millisecond away from smashing him to pieces.

  In little boxes on the cover on the far left are featured four other characters who fill out the comic book: The Streak (stolen from The Flash), The Flower Man, Stormy Craig, and Ruff Rawson, all unabashed copies of admired comic book or newspaper strips.

  And so went my after-school days and weekends at ages ten, eleven, and twelve. If I wasn’t reading comics, I was making up my own. Sixty-four pages a week, stories and art by Jules Feiffer under a series of pseudonyms, so that the imaginary readers would be fooled into thinking that this outpouring of work (Radio Comics, Star Comics, Streak Comics) was turned out by a diverse staff. On page 48 of Comics Caravan, for example, I see that Gunner Dixon is credited to the writing-drawing team of Rogers and Craig, in imitation not only of Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster’s soldier-of-fortune hero, Slam Bradley, but of their joint authorship as well. The Flower Man, which follows, is by George Smith and, six pages on, Ruff Rawson.

  Here’s how Roger and Craig’s Gunner Dixon begins:

  Entering New York Gunner Dixon two-fisted adventurer gets into a mess of trouble.

  “New York at last!”

  “Swell to be back!”

  “Step on it!”

  “Hey watch out you crazy fool!”

  “Who d’ya think ya are lug!”

  “I got a good minds to slug ya!”

  “Better luck next time!”

  “Get him!”

  “He hit the boss!”

  “Break it up!”

  “Don’t hit me!”

  “Leggo!”

  “Who are they anyhow?”

  “Brother your playin’ with dynamite! That’s boss Kelly!”

  I was passionate about these underwritten, speedily sketched enterprises. They meant my life. My mother urged me to get out of the house, and I couldn’t understand why. Hiding out in my room drawing comics was far more rewarding than anything I could possibly find in the alternately deadly dull and scary streets. Out in the street, I wasn’t the best of anything. But in my bedroom I was the best cartoonist. And on my block I was the best cartoonist. In my school I was the best cartoonist! My dream and my scheme were to take over the world as best cartoonist. But that required practice, practice, practice.

  I tried to draw in different styles to fool the reader. One style was borrowed from Milton Caniff, whose Terry and the Pirates had an increasingly hypnotic effect on me. Caniff was a master of complex light and dark shading and contrast, of movie-angle shots, alternating long shots, medium shots, and close-ups.

  If I couldn’t design a page or draw as well as Caniff, at least I could steal from him. In comic book parlance, stealing was known as “swiping.” Not only did I swipe from Caniff, but in my other comics I swiped from Alex Raymond, whose slick and elegantly illustrated Sunday-page Flash Gordon was an enormous influence on everyone, including, years later, George Lucas in Star Wars. I even sw
iped from the swipers, whom I could imitate better than the big boys because I found their level of proficiency less of a challenge.

  There was no onus to swiping other cartoonists’ art. Looking not like yourself was a goal to shoot for. Extraordinary work was out there for the taking, why restrict oneself? I preferred Caniff’s look and Alex Raymond’s and, not to be ignored, Hal Foster’s Prince Valiant and Burne Hogarth’s Tarzan. So many riches out there to be plundered. I plundered, proudly.

  Caniff’s movielike action sequences, strong on atmosphere and eloquent silences, inspired me, among others, to wholesale thievery of his art.

  © 2010, Tribune Media Services, Inc. All rights reserved.

  Above, but one of many “swipes” where I did my best to make the Caniff look my own.

  THE BAR MITZVAH HOSTAGE

  As far back as I can remember, religion was a puzzle to me that I had no interest in solving. I understood what it did for others, but I could never figure out what it could do for me. As a kid, I would see on my walks Jews on their way to shul, Catholics coming out of church, and I remember thinking: “They actually do this, I mean, outside of movies?”

  I understood the role of God in movies. He was in place to be on our side. I was meant to admire and did admire the GIs that crossed themselves before going into battle. I understood that the enemy didn’t do that. We did that. And in a way, it made sense in movies, the way everything else made sense, but it wasn’t understood to work that way in the real world. From Fred and Ginger to the rewards of worship, it didn’t work that way in the real world.

  It wasn’t that I lacked faith. I was an American boy: I believed, oh yes, I believed. In movies, in comics, in radio, in the New York Yankees … I believed in FDR and the New Deal, I believed in the perfectibility of man, I believed that all men were brothers (women had not yet been metaphored into the club), I believed that if I did unto others that they would do unto me, I believed in the rational, the idealistic, the essential goodness of man—and that I was an integral part of the American dream. I believed that I was destined to be a famous cartoonist and that would change my life—and I believed that my life very much needed changing. So I had more faith than I knew what to do with. It just didn’t seem to have anything to do with Jews or God, who, I could see from the facts of my life, were almost never on my side.