Feiffer / Sick, Sick, Sick by Jules Feiffer (No. 6)

Feiffer / Sick, Sick, Sick (1956-1965)

by Jules Feiffer 

REVIEW BY ROBERT BOYD:

(from The 100 Best Comics of the Century! in The Comics Journal #210, 1999)

Jules Feiffer began his strip Sick, Sick, Sick in the Village Voice in 1956. He later claimed that it was a cynical move, designed to put him on the map by putting his work in front of the New York book editors who had previously given him the bum's rush. But this doesn't ring totally true when one sits down and reads the strips. It took Feiffer a little while to get up to full steam, but once he did, Sick, Sick, Sick (later retitled Feiffer) became a classic - a razor-sharp satire of the lives of hip young urbanites and the world they inhabited. 

His quintessential character Bernard Mergendelier, a young urban hippie type destined for a life of mediocrity. He craves power over his own life - his love life, his work, his day-to-day existence - and simultaneously worships and despises anyone who does have that kind of power. Hence his ambiguous relationship with his friend Huey, the Brando-esque jerk to whom all the women flock. Feiffer gives Huey some of his best lines: "Put on your shoes, I'll walk you to the subway' is repeated ironically by R. Crumb's loathsome protagonist in Snoid. The sequence in which Bernard is discussing love and respect while Huey makes eye-contact with a "phoney little magazine chick" is a classic comparison of two types.

As Feiffer and the country moved deeper into the '60s, Feiffer evolved into more of a political strip, and Feiffer is still one of the best political cartoonists alive. He works without the symbolic characters that have been the political cartoonists stock in trade since Nast. His approach to political cartooning is original and obviously an influence on younger political cartoonists like Toles and Tom Tomorrow.

It almost seems too much to add that Feiffer is an excellent playwright, screenwriter, and most recently, children's book author. And as a cartoonist, Feiffer's been willing to radically experiment, as best exemplified by the oddly fascinating cartoon novel Tantrum. It is difficult to imagine any other successful strip cartoonist taking such a bold aesthetic risk as Feiffer did with Tantrum. 

But his weekly strip remains his most influential work. In the world of daily strips, it is impossible to conceive of Doonesbury without Feiffer. And perhaps more important, he showed cartoonists that it was possible to have relatively uncensored, adult-oriented weekly comic strips. As underground newspapers evolved into alternative newsweeklies all over America, Feiffer's descendants proliferated. Without Feiffer, there may have been no weekly strips be Matt Groening, Lynda Barry, Ben Katchor, Kazans, Carol Lay, Tony Millionaire, Tom Tomorrow and many other. But few of these younger cartoonists have yet matched the brilliance of the first 10 years of Sick, Sick, Sick.

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

Village Voice: Jules Feiffer in Context (2018)

Vault of Culture: Jules Feiffer - The Great Comic Book Heroes (2020)