He was also capable of painting beautiful watercolor renditions of dancers fixed in the fluidity of a moment, but his true genius emerged when his figures were prodded into motion, dancing or walking or talking β especially talking β from panel to panel until their stories were told. His own seemingly unceasing movement was brought to an end by congestive heart failure on Jan.
His affinity for visual storytelling seized him at an early age. Neither athletic enough to join the neighborhood boys roughhousing and stickballing in the street nor brainy enough to earn accolades at school, Feiffer preferred to stay in his room communing with Captain Easy, Flash Gordon and Superman. Outside his room was the Depression. He had been born on its cusp on Jan. Like much of the population in that era, his father David, a World War I hero, had failed at business and was mostly unemployed.
This resulted in a permanently strained mother-son relationship. Still, it seems likely that Rhoda Feiffer inspired, directly or indirectly, much of the creative course of his life. For one thing, her dissatisfactions fueled his own ambitions and set the stage for years of psychotherapy, which instilled in him an appreciation of the unconscious motivations of urban Americans.
Though he never graduated from college a fact that fed a lingering inferiority complex , his sensitivity to modern neuroses aligned him with a milieu in which writers and artists were enthusiastically exploring the ramifications of Freudian theory. Her hours huddled over the table drawing were a glimpse into his own future. Her figures were often in the act of walking, but there was no other panel for them to walk into. They progressed from dress to dress, always ready to go out, but hung motionless in space.
Already, at the age of 7, as evidenced by the sketches he drew of Popeye and other comics heroes, he had a style. His bodies were in motion, had weight and momentum. He was 7 when he won a gold medal in the John Wanamaker Art Contest for his crayon rendition of cowboy star Tom Mix capturing an outlaw.
