Cartoonist Jules Feiffer Speaks About New Graphic Novel

Long-time Village Voice and Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist Jules Feiffer was at the Parrish Art Museum in Southampton to discuss his new book: a graphic novel, titled Kill My Mother, on April 18.

Feiffer, who began teaching a course called Humor and Truth at Southampton College at the turn of the new millennium, has now focused his teaching on the graphic novel at Stony Brook Southampton. The octogenarian spent most of his career in New York City writing cartoon strips, originally, that carried messages of social change. Since that time he has developed plays for stage and television, and wrote screenplays, most notably Carnal Knowledge, starring Jack Nicholson and Ann Margaret and Popeye, with Robin Williams and Shelley Duvall.

But in his formative years he was very much influenced by the hard-boiled crime fiction and newspaper adventure strips of the Depression Era, he told the audience of roughly 50 people who turned out for his conversation with Parrish Director Terrie Sultan. After 60 years or writing, drawing, trying to affect social change and teaching the next generation of writers, Feiffer said he finally sat down and returned to his childhood roots.

“I got tired of writing about these social issues and nothing getting better,” Feiffer told the audience while sitting in a gallery space whose walls were lined with framed illustrations of the work that appears in Kill My Mother. “I gave up the illusion of making social change and I figured out a way to do what I loved.”

Feiffer said despite the long hours alone at his drafting table, the graphic novel was a collaboration. Of sorts.

“It’s a collaborative experience,” he said of the many hats he had to wear. “It starts with a writer, who is me, and goes to an editor, who is me, and then to a director, who is me and then it gets rewritten by me in a way that would enrage the original writer had it not been me.”

His journey as an artist, he said, has led him to a place now where he can create for his own satisfaction. When he was approached by the curators at the Parrish Museum, Feiffer said they were looking for guidance on how to draft the wall text that accompanies the rather expansive exhibit. For Feiffer, it was more than a linear narrative for viewers to follow in order to digest the plot of Kill My Mother.

“I wanted the gallery to tell the story of how I came to this point in my life,” he said. “Which had nothing to do with career, nothing to do with ambition. It was more like a ‘Yippie! I figured it out.’ And that ‘Yippie’ has carried me through this whole process.”

Kill My Mother was published last summer by Norton.