Tantrum by Jules Feiffer (No. 50)

Tantrum (1979)

by Jules Feiffer

REVIEW BY RAY MESCALLADO:
(from The 100 Best Comics of the Century! in The Comics Journal #210, 1999)

At 42, family man Leo Doug has had enough of responsibility, of maturity, of "No give. No give. No give." So one night, like Gregor Samsa with a Peter Pan complex, Leo makes himself two-years old again. What follows is a journey that would daunt any adult, never mind a child: Leo proceeds to abandon his family, tries to return to his parents, seeks help from his siblings, and even encounters an enclave of other two-year-old adults. As it turns out, Leo can't help acting like an adult, though that doesn't always mean he's behaving maturely when he does so. 

The most memorable sequence occurs when Leo seeks out his brother's estranged wife, Joyce. A whole other mind/body corruption is in evidence with Joyce: lost in body-image issues, desperately wishing, "If I could be all essence and no body..." The sick, sick, sick codependency is fleshed out between the two to excellent effect - and not without a touch of empathy for both characters.

Feiffer had previously explored the role of childhood in a supposedly mature world: 1959's Munro, his first extended comic story, was about a child accidentally drafted into the military. Published 20 years later, Tantrum is Feiffer at the height of his powers, and the graphic novel format allows him a scope and bravura that only amplifies the achievement of his weekly strip. Each panel takes up a whole page, allowing Feiffer to fill out the world around his characters (a luxury he often eschews in his strip) and create highly dramatic images. Leo is often drawn to emphasise his metamorphosis, but there are panels where the outsized emotions and ego of our anti-hero are reflected in the choice of angles. Feiffer's distinctive monologue rhythms remain very much in evidence, an incantatory exposure of modern non-communication. Even when facing each other, people rarely hold an actual dialogue in Feiffer's works: they compare their relative lots in life, they antagonise without hearing the other side, but rarely do they desire to connect. Consider Leo's brother upon meeting his de-aged sibling: "Leo! Good to see ya" Looking' good. Lost weight. Got hair piece. Fabulous! Miss Swallow, two Perriers."

Narcissism is just one flaw, and Feiffer delights in all the contradictions of human behaviour. The advice Leo gives a real child remains indisputable: Don't mature! Mature people do the shit work!" But where are the mature people in this story? At best, maturity is a fleeting moment of grace and not a consistent attitude. This lesson is writ large in the ending. Is it positive turn of events, is it a confirmation of our worst fears? It's left up to us to decide. After all, what matters most in Tantrum is the comedy of human passions. And as Feiffer so often reminds us, such passions are frequently misleading, rarely politically correct, and never as obvious as we think.

REVIEW BY NEIL GAIMAN:

(from an introduction to the Fantagraphics Books 1997 edition of Tantrum)

...When the history of the Graphic Novel (or whatever they wind up calling long stories created in words and pictures for adults, in the time when the histories are appropriate) is written, there will be a whole chapter about Tantrum, one of the first and still one of the wisest and sharpest things created in this strange publishing category, and one of the books that, along with Will Eisner's A Contract With God, began the movement that brought us such works as Maus, as Love and Rockets, as From Hell -- the works that stretch the envelope of what words and pictures were capable of, and could not have been anything but what they were, pictures and words adding up to something that could not have been a film or a novel or a play: that were intrinsically comics, with all a comics' strengths. [Read the full essay here...]

FURTHER READING:
TCJ: A Conversation with Jules Feiffer (2014)
TCJ: The Jules Feiffer Interview (1988)
The Great Comic Book Heroes by Jules Feiffer (1965)