ILL from PT. Short essay-like pieces. Cartooned for the Village Voice for years, political, during Vietnam. Children's books, plays. Drops lots of interesting names like Hoffman, Altman, Arkin. ( )

It's a memoir. A lot about his dysfunctional family: his mother was the cliche Jewish mother, and then some. Gaslighting, a hypochondriac, piling on guilt, shaming his father for not being successful. She had aspirations of greater things and a struggling business selling her sketches of New York fashions to department stores in the rest of the country. His father wasn’t much better, always putting down his children.
Jules had similar delusions: convinced that he was going to be the greatest cartoonist in the world.... except he didn't draw very well. But he managed to get a job as a writing assistant to Will Eisner, then started drawing his own strip, Clifford, that ran as filler in the Spirit comic.
The draft got him out of his parents’ house. He hated every minute of his time in the military but he came up with Munro, a satire about a toddler who’s mistakenly drafted into the army. He got work doing drawings then started working at the Village Voice, for free at first.
There’s lots of interesting stuff about his creative process and various projects with writers, plus his thoughts about how some of his plays worked or didn't. ( )

Adult nonfiction. I guess you have to be really interested in Feiffer (as opposed to just a little bit curious) for this to hold your attention. He has more than a few good stories to tell, though. ( )

An autobiography by the cartoonist/playwright, Jules Feiffer. He recounts growing up as a skinny Jewish boy in the Depression; his one big love was cartoons. He was fortunate to get the opportunity to work with Will Eisner. He spends most of his time on his early years, breezing through the last four decades of his life, which is OK, because that part of the book lost some of the sparkle of the earlier pages, and the author seemed on the verge of going from acerbic with into maudlin sentimentality. This is the sort of autobiography where you don't stop and ask yourself if it's true, or if the other people in his life would see it the same way. This book reads like a novel, enormously funny and moving. You don't care how much of it's true, it's so fun to read. ( )