Feiffer's Change of Venue

I've sometimes wondered about the disparity between Jules Feiffer: Ass-Kicking Village Voice Cartoonist and Jules Feiffer: Children's Author. I've only met the latter Feiffer and reconciling him with the former hasn't been easy. So a recent Mens News Daily piece entitled Satirist, Cartoonist Jules Feiffer Focuses on Children regarding Feiffer's recent School of Visual Arts’ Master Communicator Award makes a nice correlation between the man's past and current state of writing.

Feiffer hopes to connect with his readers on their own terms. “What kids hate most is to be lectured at,” he says. “And we dismiss kids and disparage kids and don’t take kids very seriously. So when I was going to address them in kids’ books, I was going to take them seriously.” But also, he adds, “with a sense of fun. Not, as other authors have, where the joke is on the kid, but where the joke is on the grownups.”

Give 'em hell, Jules.

Thanks to Big A little a for the link.