Hey, remember back in June when I wrote a bit about how much I was digging The Explainers?
Well, it appears the mainstream media has caught up with me
The Sunday Book Review in the New York Times reviewed the book this weekend. It was the cover review. Here’s an excerpt:
Of course, representing any Feiffer strip with a quick quotation really doesn’t do it justice. His garrulous, neurotic characters yammer on and on, their logorrhea half the fun (and often taking up more than half the space). A mouse in the clutches of a cat shouts: “Go ahead! Eat me! Play into their hands!” The cat meekly responds, “Can’t we just accept our given roles?” There follows an elaborate back-and-forth about established mores, class systems and man’s paternalism toward animals, which so flummoxes the cat that he loses his appetite and leaves. Whereupon the mouse mutters: “Weakling — wishy-washy. I would have eaten him.” And the kicker: “What can you expect from liberals.”
Feiffer’s basic scheme was to mine the humor of social and political blather — to show, in a funny way, how people talk and talk but never connect. In our current age of blogs, compulsive confessionals and nightly shoutfests on Fox News and MSNBC, it’s no surprise that so many find him prescient.
The Time piece also includes some samples from the book.
But, the NYT isn’t the only place that’s noticed. Check out the Boston Globe:
Feiffer’s work for the Voice was genre-changing. He brought adult sensibilities into the comics, mixed elements of theater and dance with cartoons, interwove the personal and the political, and freed cartoon drawing from both the literal and the cute.
So, do you believe me now? Or did I just lose all my indie cred?
