by Larry Brody
Jules Feiffer is the comic genius who got me through high school. I was a huge fan of his early book of comics, Sick, Sick, Sick, his Bernard and Hue comic strips in both newspapers and – OMG – “Playboy,” and utterly blown away when I learned that he’d “assisted” (read “ghosted”) many of the episodes featuring what I to this day believe was the finest comic book character ever created, The Spirit.
The simple truth is that while I wanted more than anything to be like Denny Cold, the hero of The Spirit, I knew damn well that it was more than likely that the character I’d actually grow up to be was the inhibited, neurotic Bernard.
(I think I escaped Bernard’s fate ultimately, but not the ethos behind him.)
Bottom line: Jules Feiffer was and is a genius as both a writer and a cartoonist, and Dan Mirvish, one of the founders of the Slamdance Film Festival, is putting together a production of Feiffer’s screenplay about two of his best characters, my spirit brother Bernard and his longtime frenemy Huey. To facilitate this, Mirvish has gone the Kickstarter route, raising seed money to “hire a casting director, pay for our lawyer (for the three years of work he’s done for little more than a chicken sandwich), and file lots of forms.”
Bottomer line: Unless Dan Mirvish really screws it up (he’s directing) this is going to be a helluva film and I’m encouraging everyone to support it. So, with that in mind:
The Kickstarter page is HERE.
Jules Feiffer’s amazing Wikipedia page is HERE.
Feiffer’s Amazon author page is HERE.
Oh, and you couldn’t go wrong if you dipped into (after paying for) the wonderful collection of his Village Voice strips, which just happens to be HERE.
My first exposure to Feiffer was “The Phantom Tollbooth.” At a cartooning conference in Iowa in the ’90’s I sat at the same dinner table as Feiffer. He was a big fan of “The Sopranos” and had gotten cable TV for the first time just so he could watch it.