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.)