Jules Feiffer

Backing Into Forward, a memoir by cartoonist and writer Jules Feiffer, comes out next Tuesday.

You know him. Pulitzer Prize-winner Feiffer is the author of the razor-tongued play Little Murders and the ground-breaking 1971 movie Carnal Knowledge (with Jack Nicholson, Ann-Margret and Art Garfunkel) and creator of all those cynical-but-silly Playboy and Village Voice “Ode to spring” cartoons. He’s also written a wheelbarrow-full of children’s books as well as the excellent reference touchstone, The Great Comic Book Heroes, a copy of which I’ve treasured for decades.

And, of course, he apprenticed to Will Eisner.

In a perfect world, we’ll learn much about this incredibly influential artist — what he thinks, how he works — as we did about Charles Schultz from reading David Michaelis’s 2007 biography, Schultz and Peanuts. We can hope.

Read my post on Will Eisner’s The Contract With God here.