Friday, March 20, 2009

Graphic Novelists - Day 44

Yesterday morning brought Christopher Irving and me to the classic Upper West Side home of cartoonist Jules Feiffer.
Jules started out as the assistant to the great Will Eisner in 1945 and went on to doing a strip in the Village Voice for 42 years. He publish 19 books, including; Explainers: The Complete Village Voice Strips (1956-1966), The Man in the Ceiling and A Barrel of Laughs, A Vale of Tears.
The amazing thing about Jules are his incredible accomplishments outside of cartooning. He wrote the screenplays for Mike Nichol's film Carnal Knowledge and for Robert Altman's Popeye, among others. He won an Oscar in 1961 for his short animation Munro. He has also written plays, and in 1986 he won the Pulitzer Prize for his editorial cartooning in The Village Voice, and in 2004 was inducted into the Comic Book Hall of Fame. He also wrote the book, The Great Comic Book Heroes, which is considered perhaps the first piece of serious comics journalism.
For the portrait, I posed Jules on his living room couch, with his trusty sidekick, Lily, who appears in his next children's book.

Photobucket

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

The shadow in the background seems to be just as prominent as the figure.