Feiffer was reacting to the times, and she uses quotes from Mike Nichols, Hugh Hefner, Ed Koren, and this one from Art Spiegelman to reflect Mr. Fay’s fluid and urbane writing gives the sociological context that the story needs given how much Mr. That’s one of the things the many illustrations in the book establish, that with all of the false starts, the moving into new territory, the experiments with style, there is a core confidence in Mr.

Feiffer’s early comics, the breakthrough strips in The Village Voice, and even the plots of his plays and movies that followed.

The drawings, youthful as they are, establish an attitude, vigorous and pugnacious, that we can recognize in Mr. The first chapters show drawings Jules’s mother saved from his childhood and the family photographs from the same period. Feiffer’s main themes (minus the math), the cover sets up the charming and witty tone of the whole book. In the drawings’ obvious fervor in which the young Jules proclaims himself an artist and its establishment of two of Mr. In faint pencil lines all over the cover are Jules’s doodles of superheroes, boxers, and math computations. 5.14 along with a determined drawing of a palette and brush. It is an endearingly clunky lettering job spelling out JULES FEIFFER ART 330 SEC. The hard cover underneath the dust jacket of “Out of Line” is a facsimile reproduction of Mr. Feiffer was talking specifically about the ’60s and his strip “Sick, Sick, Sick” in The Village Voice, but the combination of societal insight and creative aggression reflected in his remark has been the booster rocket of all his work and why, for more than 50 years, we have hung on the fence of his deconstruction site watching the work of this nervy kid who can say the things we wouldn’t dare and probably couldn’t think of in any case. I wanted to circumcise the sucker and transplant him from the Jazz Age from whence he came to the Age of Anxiety, from Babbittry and Dale Carnegie to Sigmund Freud.” to move him out of his genteel, benign, suburban WASP landscape. “I wanted to put the essence of my reader on the page. One of the most incisive Jules Feiffer quotes Martha Fay uses in this generously illustrated biography gets to the core of the artist’s culture-shaking genius:

Reinventing comics