“Backing into Forward”

“Backing into Forward” is the story of and by Jules Feiffer, the Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist who rose to fame from his beginnings with The Village Voice. Feiffer, whose work extends to novels, children’s books, graphic novels, and screenplays, takes us through his childhood—when comics offered an escape from bullies and other hardships—and into the world of the comics industry. The Los Angeles Times says, “The book brilliantly captures adolescent confusion and self-loathing, the ambitions and working life of an unconventional artist in an era uncertain about its arts, and the furies of a political radical who watched the United States descend into gloom.” In a starred review, Publishers Weekly praises Feiffer’s “wit, angst, honesty, and self-insights”: “Intimate and entertaining, his autobiography is a revelatory evocation of fear, ambition, dread, failure, rage, and, eventually, success.” And Booklist says that Feiffer “offers social commentary and memorable moments from career and family life as he moved from cartooning to screen and playwriting, to authoring children’s books, all the while maintaining a wry perspective that shows in the cartoons interspersed throughout this wonderful memoir.”