clarulitas

Except When They Don't (2019)

Story: Laura Gehl -- Art: Joshua Heinsz

Milestone Monday: Jules Feiffer

Today we celebrate the birthday of writer and illustrator Jules Feiffer (1929-2025). Born in the Bronx, Feiffer had a long and dynamic career. Getting his start at the age of 17 as Will Eisner’s assistant --despite failing the drawing test Eisner set for him, he has produced comic strips, novels, plays, and screenplays. He won the 1986 Pulitzer Prize for Editorial Cartooning, and taught at Columbia, Yale, Northwestern, and Southampton College.

Although he illustrated Norton Juster’s The Phantom Tollbooth (1961), his prolific run as a children’s book author and illustrator came in the 90s, already late into his career. The images highlighted today are drawn from two of these later works.

Some Things Are Scary, was written by Kenosha, Wisconsin author Florence Parry Heide (1919-2011), and published by Candlewick Press out of Cambridge, MA in 2000. Feiffer treats the terrified child of Heide’s book with knowing compassion as the child faces all sorts of horrors: stepping on something squishy when you’re in your bare feet…holding on to someone’s hand that isn’t your mother’s when you thought it was…finding out your best friend has a best friend who isn’t you…

In a 1988 interview with Gary Groth, Feiffer discusses his own childhood:

I was a very shy kid, and very nervous, truly nervous about putting this talent that I fantasized a lot about on the line. Meaning that in the bright light of day, I didn’t think it would measure up to anyone else’s. So I preferred to be alone in my neighborhood, where I was the only one who could draw.

The second set of images come from I’m Not Bobby!, written and illustrated by Feiffer, and published in New York by Hyperion Books for Children in 2001. Bobby, who is not Bobby, but maybe used to be Bobby, is instead a lion, a dinosaur, a monster, a giant, a horse, a race car, an eagle, an astronaut, and a lion once more, when hungry.

Jules Feiffer died last January, at the age of 95.

--Amanda, Special Collections Graduate Intern

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