Jules Feiffer is 95 years old, and still having fun. The cartoonist has been lending his pen to a wide range of topics for adults, kids and everyone in between since he first started out as an assistant to cartoonist Will Eisner in the 1940s.
He won the Pulitzer Prize for editorial cartoons in 1986 and took is place in the Comic Book Hall of Fame in 2004. He’s won an Academy Award for Best Animated Short film for Munro in 1961, and has been recognized by the Library of Congress for “remarkable legacy” as a cartoonist, playwright, screenwriter, adult and children’s book author, illustrator, and art instructor. And now, with his first graphic novel for young readers, Amazing Grapeshe’s taking kids off on a offbeat adventure to the Lost Dimension.
In advance of the book’s release on Tuesday, Sept. 24, Feiffer sat down with PEOPLE for a chat about his life, his work and why it’s more important to him to ask the right questions than to have all the answers. The following conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
‘Amazing Grapes’ by Jules Feiffer.
Michael at Capua Books
Where did the inspiration for this story come from? How did it start?
Jules Feiffer: It’s a very good question, and the answer is, there’s no answer. I just wait ’til I’m told what to do by whatever it is in me organically and I just take orders from the voice inside me that says, “Let’s get going,” and then as much as I can, I have as little to do with the creation as possible. In a sense, I just follow the orders I’m given, which are some internal gut thing, and and when there are problems and hang-ups, I think of that as an opportunity. And as much as I can, with as little manipulation as possible, I try to follow orders and be a good boy.
It started with a discontented mother. And I realized that’s what’s happened is that she’s discontented because she’s not from this planet. She’s from another place entirely. But we don’t find that out ’til later in the book, and I didn’t find it out until later in the book. And basically it’s the story starts telling me where it wants to go.
Jules Feiffer.
JZ Holden
How has your work changed over the decades?
Feiffer: It keeps changing on me, and I enjoy it because it’s not the same old, same old. When the Village Voice fired me after 42 years or so, I didn’t realize at the time, but they were doing me a favor, and I was being released into trying things and and going in directions that I never had before, and it opened the door to a playfulness that I had lost. (Working there) had become hard work for me, and it took a while for playfulness to take over because I had a family and a living to make. But things began to fall into place, and and thank God they did, but it turned out to be a door opening instead of a door closing, and doors have kept opening ever since, and I’m grateful for that.
Has your own getting older impacted your approach, at all?
Feiffer: The older I got, the less controlling I wanted to be over the work. I wanted the work to control me and tell me what to do and I just, in a sense, follow orders. And that’s the way these ideas come. They come, or they don’t come, but they come out of what’s in the air. They come out of not what I’m thinking about, but the thinking that’s imposed on me.
One of the privileges of old age or getting older, at least in my case, is that you lose the need to control and you realize that the controlling is an illusion and that you just let things go and see where it takes you. Seeing where it takes me turns out to be far more interesting and more productive and more creative in a basic way than knowing in advance and making notes and writing down what’s gonna happen next.
That strikes me as a much more fun way to work, anyway!
Feiffer: Well, for me, it’s a lot more fun. Every every author has his or her own way, and I think what I’m describing now would horrify a lot of people and more power to them. Everybody has to find one’s own way of working.
Do you think that playfulness is what draws you to writing for children?
Feiffer: I think I think that’s exactly it. Because (kids are) playing, it’s something inside them that says, “Do this. Do that, do the other thing.” They’re not thinking, “Now I will do this, now I should hit the ball over here.” It’s not a conscious thing. They’re just, well, it’s what we call play and I think play is the best way of describing what I still do. It’s my own peculiar kind of play, but it gives me an astonishing, in probably illegal degree of pleasure.
Is there a lesson in all of this, for yourself or your readers?
Feiffer: So much of what kids are taught in school is about control. Being controlled, controlling your fate, knowing what you’re gonna do before you do it. Don’t make mistakes. And all of that, I think, is counter to the spirit of a real life and a true life, and a happy life: that mistakes are some of the things that lead us into the into most important things. The only interesting answers that are worth paying attention to are things that open your mind to further curiosity, not less curiosity. And we want to be curious all the time about everything, because it always keeps changing.
And sometimes it takes us years to make our own choices, and some of us are lucky, and we find out. Other people just follow orders all their lives. And I’m still trying, after all of these years. I’m 95, you know, learning how to deal with all of the contradictions, not believing for the moment that I’ve got the answers. But I know goddamn well, I’ve got the right questions.
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Amazing Grapes by Jules Feiffer is out Sept. 24 and available for preorder now, wherever books are sold.
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