Sick, Sick, Well

Just a year ago, the work of Jules Feiffer, 29, a slight, introspective New York cartoonist, was appearing only (and without pay) in the Village Voice, a furrowed-brow Greenwich Village weekly. Now Cartoonist Feiffer is up to his clean, button-down collar in offers from publishers. One book of his cartoons is a bestseller (5,000 copies a week). He appears in the London Observer, dashes off magazine ads and features (Playboy, SPORTS ILLUSTRATED), is discussing a screenplay for Director Stanley (Paths of Glory) Kubrick. His income tax for 1958 will be more than his entire income for 1957 (about $7,500), and his 1959 gross promises to run into six figures. This week Feiffer and the Hall Syndicate ("Herblock," Norman Vincent Peale, Pogo) announced that starting in April his work will appear weekly in the Boston Globe, Minneapolis Star Tribune, Newark Star-Ledger and Long Island Press, and added that a score of other papers were in various degrees of negotiations.

"Serious Humorist." A mild-mannered intellectual who prudently wears a sweater beneath his suit coat, Jules Feiffer (rhymes with knifer) got well on Sick, Sick, Sick. This was not only the title of his book but also the wry tone of his work on such topics as frustrated love in Greenwich Village, the H-bomb tests, and psychosomatic illness. Many of Feiffer's best cartoons are not funny at all, instead sting with bitterness and poignancy, e.g., the numbing isolation of a small boy whose braying mother prefers his brother. "I'm against the misuse of power of all kinds," says Feiffer. "I'm against people who use their views and authority as a ploy against others."

Feiffer calls himself a "serious humorist," speaks of "writing" a cartoon because of the supremacy of the words over the drawing. Using pared sticks (the kind that restaurants send out to stir coffee) as pens, he usually gets his drawing right the first try. But he has rewritten captions as many as 15 times, often working on the subway while riding from his bachelor apartment in Brooklyn Heights under the East River to Manhattan.

"Miserable Years." Feiffer was born in The Bronx, and has never got over it. ("The place I grew up in didn't even have the dignity to be a slum.") His father held a variety of jobs, from dental technician to salesman; his mother was a fashion designer. Like his characters, Feiffer suffered many childhood frustrations. (''Echoes of my childhood keep creeping into my work. I'm sneaky--I hide behind my pictures.") In 1946 he got out of James Monroe High School to discover that he lacked half a credit to get into college. The thought of going back was too much ("What a miserable four years"), and so he went to work as a cartoonist's assistant. Drafted during the Korean war, Feiffer put in two sad-sack years Stateside, was discharged as a PFC. That rank still nettles Feiffer. Says he: "I didn't want them to give me anything."

He is not troubled by the fact that publishers now seem ready to give him whatever he wants. This spring McGraw-Hill will bring out his second book, a collection of four longish cartoons called Passionella and Other Stories, and next fall Sick, Sick, Sick will be published in England. He insisted on and got a provision in his contract that not a word of his material can be changed by his syndicated papers--a notable exception to standard practice. Says Feiffer, sounding like one of his cartoonland characters: "I'm not frustrated any more." As if to prove it, he is now trying to shake off the Sick, Sick, Sick label.

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