JULES FEIFFER AND NORTON JUSTER

I’ve just started reading Jules Feiffer’s memoir, Backing into Forward (440 6x9-inch pages, mostly text with a few of his cartoons, b/w; hardcover, $30), and he has me from the start.  “Comics,” he writes, “ — I ate them, I breathed them. I thought about them day and night. I learned to read only so that I could read comics. Nothing else was worth the effort. ... I was small and powerless, so inadequate that I couldn’t bat, throw, or catch a ball (a disaster in real life, but in comics a self-imposed limitation that hid my superpowers from evildoers).” Reading comics and “listening to radio serials and favored comedians — ‘Jack Armstrong,’ ‘I Love a Mystery,’ ‘Fibber McGee and Molly,’ Charlie McCarthy, Jack Benny, Burns and Allen” was what Feiffer did with his childhood. Reading this, I realize he’s writing about me. And I can’t wait to see how I turn out.

Meanwhile, after half-a-century, Feiffer is back with his one-time collaborator, Norton Juster: the two are working on a new book, The Odious Ogre, for Michael di Capua Books at Scholastic. Their previous effort together was The Phantom Tollbooth, which came out in 1961; since then it has sold 3.3 million copies.

Feiffer and Juster met while taking out the garbage: they lived in the same apartment building — Juster in the basement; Feiffer on the third floor. When the landlady ended their leases so she could renovate, the two took up residence in a nearby “seedy duplex.” Juster paced the floor as he conjured up a story. On the floor below, Feiffer could hear him walking around: annoyed by the noise, he came up to see what Juster was writing. Said Juster: “Then he drew sketches to go with the story. They were unbelievably good.”

Juster wrote two more books, reported Sue Corbett at Publishers Weekly, but, trained as an architect, he devoted most of his energy to designing buildings for the next thirty years. Feiffer also turned away from children’s books for most of his career: “I started the weekly comic strip [in the Village Voice], trying to overthrow the government,” he quipped. But he also wrote novels, plays, and, particularly in the last few years, children’s books again.

Di Capua longed to bring the duo together again, but he thought Juster’s most recent books were too “sweet” for Feiffer’s scratchy artwork and urbane sensibility. “But this story about the ogre is extremely witty and has a certain black humor to it,” di Capua said. The ogre, for instance, has an impressive vocabulary, “due mainly to having inadvertently swallowed a large dictionary while consuming the head librarian in one of the nearby towns. I knew dead certain Jules was going to want to illustrate it,” di Capua said.

He was right. Now nearly finished with the artwork, Corbett continued, Feiffer reports he’s had a blast. “The one thing I will say is that, in relation to the other characters, he is possibly the biggest ogre in captivity,” Feiffer said. “He was great fun to draw, though—more fun for me than for the ogre.”

Di Capua finds an echo of Feiffer’s Village Voice comic strip in The Ogre:  though the ogre is “extraordinarily large, exceedingly ugly, unusually angry, constantly hungry, and absolutely merciless,” the girl he encounters, working in her cottage garden, is unfazed by his brutishness. “She’s another manifestation of Jules’s dancer,” di Capua said. Only, somehow, she’s better. “Not that I’m knocking his earlier work,” he added, “but there’s a certain freedom that’s noticeably on a higher level. You can tell he’s having a great time.”

Right again, Feiffer said, who did the illustrations in pen and ink brush with colored markers, gouache “and anything else I could think of. It’s my new way of working, which I love.” In fact, he and Juster are already planning their next joint maneuver, he says: “The Phantom Ogre, or maybe The Odious Tollbooth — coming in 2060.”