'Explainers,' written and illustrated by Jules Feiffer - Review - NYTimes.com

Book Review - 'Explainers,' written and illustrated by Jules Feiffer - Review - NYTimes.com: "At this point, there’s an entire generation of parents and kids who know Jules Feiffer solely as a children’s book author, the man behind the charming bedtime standbys “Bark, George” and “By the Side of the Road.” It’s been eight years since he stopped doing his weekly syndicated comic strip for grown-ups, which was simply called “Feiffer,” and 37 years since Mike Nichols filmed Feif fer’s screenplay “Carnal Knowledge,” an acutely adult-oriented examination of sexual desire, virginity loss, infidelity, divorce and other subjects that never come up in “Bark, George.” So the new anthology “Explainers,” which gathers all of Feiffer’s Village Voice strips from 1956 to 1966, is a welcome reintroduction — or introduction, for the uninitiated — to a great cartoonist who boldly bent his medium to adult purposes long before it was commonplace to do so. As squat and dense as a loaf of spelt bread, this book reproduces the first decade of “Feiffer” in its entirety, and therefore captures in minute detail the birth and development of a whole new approach to cartooning."