Review by Etta Wilson
You've just got to change scenes when things get too tight in one place. Master cartoonist Jules Feiffer understands this well. In his first full-color picture book "Meanwhile," he depicts a young boy named Raymond who loves comic books where the word "meanwhile" (always in a box) is the signal for scene changes.When Raymond's mother persists in calling him, he writes the word on his bedroom wall and "meanwhiles" to adventures fighting pirates, escaping from a posse out West and being chased by Martians in outer space. In each situation Raymond always finds a creative way to write the word when he needs to get out of a jam, at the same time crying "It's not fair!" But alas, Raymond uses up all his "meanwhiles" and seems almost glad to do his mother's bidding back in the land of reality.
Feiffer, from the age of five, read comics. It gave him a sort of "worldly imagination -- Popeye on a scale with the Marx Brothers." He loves detective stories, especially the ordered logic and a kind of escape found in Agatha Christie and Nero Wolfe. A few years after World War II, Feiffer began his career with politically subversive cartoons featuring Monroe, a four-year-old who was drafted by mistake. Now the author of two much-praised novels for children as well as adult novels, screenplays and stage dramas, Feiffer has received the Pulitzer Prize for editorial cartooning. Who knows what creative front he will "meanwhile" to next?
Humor derives from personality. Either you're funny or you're not.The comic strip teaches you to think in shorthand.
Anything you write has to have its own rules, and you'd better stick by them.
If you want anger to work as an art form, you have to find a way to coddle the truth. Don't show your views outright.
To write for kids, I make the action entertaining but something they can feel good about.
©1997, ProMotion, inc.