This July: Comics and Funnies
- lindsey4824
- 6 days ago
- 9 min read
Whether a poem from the POV of someone slowly being consumed by a boa constrictor or a family shopping for a new car that can transform into a dinosaur, elephant, gigantic turtle and huge flying chicken, it should come as no surprise that some of the funniest children’s book creators also made comics.
In July we’ll explore the lives and legacies of William Steig, Shel Silverstein, Jules Feiffer, and Daniel Pinkwater.
Join us for Story Hours and our adults-only Let’s Take a Dive program to learn more about these creators and celebrate their inspiring work.
William Steig (1907 – 2003)
Once hailed as the “King of Cartoons” by Newsweek, William Steig first gained notoriety as a prolific and successful cartoonist. He created more than 100 covers and 1700 drawings for The New Yorker and published more than a dozen books of his cartoons for adults.
Raised in the Bronx, Steig’s parents were immigrants from what is now Ukraine and encouraged all their children to pursue careers in the arts. He graduated high school at 15 and dropped out of three colleges, never completing a degree. He spent two years at City College of New York (where he devoted more time to playing water polo than studying), three years at the National Academy of Design, and five days at the Yale School of Art.
Though the Steig family never had much money, they lost everything in the stock market crash. In the midst of the Great Depression, Steig began selling his drawings to help his family. His first cartoon for The New Yorker ran in 1930, just five years after the magazine was started.
After nearly four decades of creating cartoons, Steig ventured into the world of children’s books. His friend Robert Kraus — a children’s book illustrator and peer at The New Yorker — invited Steig to create something for his publishing house, The Windmill Books. The result was Roland the Minstrel Pig about a pig who leaves his friends to become a singer.
Steig found immediate success. He won the Caldecott Medal for his third book, Sylvester and the Magic Pebble, a Caldecott Honor for The Amazing Bone, and Newbery Honors for both Abel’s Island and Doctor De Soto. Steig’s most commercially famous character is the titular ogre from his book Shrek!, which was the inspiration for the animated movie series of the same name.
In the more than 30 children’s books he created, Steig excelled at both writing and illustrating. His prose is elevated and energetic with expressions like “zingo” and “hanky-panky.” His thick, sketchy black line and watercolor pictures are instantly recognizable. The subject matter of his books feels at once fantastical and familiar. Whether donkeys, pigs, mice, human or ogre, his characters face their challenges with love, courage and curiosity. While the results are often poignant, Steig’s wry humor nullifies any sentimentality.
“I like drawing, but not illustrating, because basically I am a doodler. My best work is spontaneous and unconscious, as someone once pointed out, calling me a ‘sublime doodler’–– the best compliment I ever had.”
Steig died in 2003, seven months before the “Shrek 2” movie was released. He was outspoken in his opinion of the first “Shrek” film inspired by his book.
"It's vulgar, it's disgusting — and I loved it," he said.
His book The Zabajaba Jungle, which is currently out of print, is featured in The Rabbit hOle at the museum’s east exit. Families must enter a giant dragon’s gaping maw to be spat out into Max’s Kansas City — a cafe inspired by characters created by Maira Kalman, another illustrator who worked for The New Yorker for decades.
Jules Feiffer (1929 - 2025)
When Jules Feiffer died earlier this year, obituaries struggled to encapsulate his remarkably varied and accomplished work as a cartoonist, playwright, screenwriter, adult and children's book author, illustrator, and art instructor. The New York Times headline resorted to using a catch-all: “Jules Feiffer, Acerbic Cartoonist, Writer and Much Else, Dies at 95.”
Growing up in the Depression-era Bronx, Feiffer was a small and skinny kid who enjoyed radio dramas and newspaper comic strips.
"What I loved best about these comics was that they created a very personal world in which almost anything could take place. And readers would accept it even if it had nothing to do with any other kind of world. It was the fantasy world I loved.”
After graduating high school, he finagled his way into a studio assistant position with his idol, cartoonist Will Eisner. He worked his way up from studio gofer to drawing panel rules and word balloons, filling in shadows and eventually to writing dialogue and entire stories for the Eisner’s series “The Spirit.”
Two years later Eisner assigned to him the humorous comic strip “Clifford,” which he worked on until about 1950.
Feiffer was drafted in the U.S. Army and worked on cartoon animation for the Signal Corps. He said the daily misuse of authority he witnessed during his two years of service turned him into a satirist.
In 1956, he became a staff cartoonist for the Village Voice, where he had a strip called “Feiffer.” Considered a pioneer of the alt weekly cartoon genre, he explored social anxieties and tackled a range of political topics including civil rights, the Vietnam War, and presidents for more than four decades. He was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1986 and inducted into the Comic Book Hall of Fame in 2004.
Feiffer’s children’s books are rich with satirical humor, expressive illustrations, and engaging narratives that hook readers from start to finish. His collaboration with Norton Juster on the novel The Phantom Tollbooth is arguably his most well-known children’s book.
Though he disliked the term “graphic novel,” his book Tantrum is credited as one of the first.
“I didn’t call it a graphic novel,” he told The Atlantic in 2010. “I call it a novel in cartoons. Graphic novels are called graphic novels because people are ashamed of the term ‘cartoon,’ which is idiotic. I’ve always been thrilled to be a cartoonist, and I’m proud of it, and I like the term.”
In his children’s book Meanwhile, which is depicted at the Rabbit hOle, Feiffer perfectly captures the desperate angst of a young boy who will do anything to avoid completing his chores, paced in panels like a comic book.
Reflecting on his impact, The Comics Journal said, “Jules Feiffer mastered every major narrative art form of the 20th century — comic strips (Feiffer), theater (Little Murders), cinema (Carnal Knowledge), novels (Harry the Rat with Women), graphic novels (Tantrum), children’s literature (Bark, George) — and he used them to capture our every neurosis, desire, fear, hypocrisy, fantasy, rationalization and twisted daydream.”
Shel Silverstein (1930 – 1999)
Shel Silverstein’s prolific artistic output spanned genres, audiences, and disciplines; positioning him as one of the best-known children’s book creators of the 20th century.
Born Sheldon Allan Silverstein, he grew up in Chicago and, according to him, became interested in drawing because he wasn’t good at sports and girls didn’t like him.
After finishing high school he studied art for one year at the Chicago Academy of Fine Arts and English for four years at the University of Illinois and the Chicago College of Performing Arts at Roosevelt University. In an early “about the author” blurb he said his career as an artist began while he was a hot dog vendor in Chicago ballparks.
He was drafted into the U.S. Army before completing college. While serving in Korea and Japan he was assigned to do layout for the Army paper, Pacific Stars and Stripes.
He began drawing cartoons based on his observations to amuse himself. Within weeks they were printed in the paper, and eventually he convinced his superiors to let him focus full time on cartoons and send reports back from his travels around the Far East.
After his stint with the Armed Forces, Silverstein wrote and drew hundreds of pieces for Playboy Magazine, Sports Illustrated, and other periodicals. In addition to bawdy cartoons, Silverstein contributed poems and other creative content for Playboy. He also wrote travelogues for the magazine reporting from various locations, including Russia, the Middle East, and a nudist camp in Pennsylvania.
Silverstein was also a successful playwright, lyricist, and composer. Most famously, he wrote the song “A Boy Named Sue,” which was brought to the mainstream by Johnny Cash and won a Grammy in 1970. Associated with the outlaw country movement of the 1970s and 80s, his other hits include “The Cover of the Rolling Stone,” and “Unicorn.”
His songs have been recorded by Waylon Jennings, Loretta Lynn, John Prine, Judy Collins and many, many more. Silverstein was posthumously inducted into the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame in 2002.
Silverstein’s first children’s book, Uncle Shelby’s Story of Lafcadio: The Lion Who Shot Back was published in 1963. The following year he published A Giraffe and a Half, The Giving Tree, Who Wants a Cheap Rhinoceros?, and his first collection of poems for children, Uncle Shelby's Zoo: Don't Bump the Glump! and Other Fantasies.
In the 1980’s Silverstein wrote several short adult plays and collaborated with playwright-director David Mamet on the screenplay of the 1988 film Things Change.
Silverstein created more than a dozen books for children, several of which were published after his death in 1999.
His poetry collection, Where the Sidewalk Ends, is depicted at The Rabbit hOle via sculpture and audio, inviting families to enjoy his humorous verse while interacting with his outlandish characters. The audio feature in the exhibit is a recording of Silverstein himself reciting passages from Where the Sidewalk Ends.
Daniel Pinkwater (1941 – )
Tooth-Gnasher Superflash — a story about a family buying a new car — perfectly encapsulates Daniel Pinkwater’s absurd narrative tone and simple illustration style. Unbeknownst to the car salesman, Mr. Sandy, the Tooth-Gnasher Superflash car can turn into a dinosaur, elephant, turtle, and giant flying chicken.
Manus Pinkwater was born in 1941 in Memphis, Tennessee, to Jewish immigrant parents from Poland. He was raised primarily in Chicago. Pinkwater began writing in 4th grade, and once saved up his money to buy a Junior Artist’s kit consisting of some Hunt’s Crow Quill pens, a bottle of India ink, some nice paper, and a “how to draw” booklet.
“I went to work and had good results at once,” Pinkwater said. “I showed my drawings to my sister-in-law, who went to art school at night, and she accused me of trying to pass off an older kid’s work as my own, marched me into the living room, and told my parents that I was growing up to be a liar and a criminal. My parents were watching television and, without looking up, told me not to aggravate my sister-in-law.”
Pinkwater studied sculpture at Bard College, intending to pursue a career in the field. However, after being told by his mentor that he would never make it as a sculptor (which Pinkwater did not take well), he pivoted and began taking lessons in art therapy, then joined an artists’ cooperative in Africa. By 1970 he’d returned to the United States, fell into picture book creation, and was also a member of a cult.
One day he wrote to the cult’s guru who lived somewhere in Asia asking for a new name. The guru wrote back that his name should begin with a “D.” Pinkwater replied with a list of potential “D” names (including “Duck” as an option to test the guru.) The guru’s next letter informed him that his name would be Daniel.
Pinkwater’s knack for the unusual, the hilarious, the strange, and the silly is ever-present in both his written and his illustrated work. His first children’s book, The Terrible Roar, was published in 1970 when Pinkwater was 29 years old, kicking off a lengthy and prolific career in the publishing world.
To date, Pinkwater has created more than 100 picture books and novels for children. He’s worked with many different editors, publishers, and often collaborated with his late wife Jill Pinkwater. (In a recent Substack entry, author Hal Johnson ranked 104 of Pinkwater’s books.)
In the 1980s, Pinkwater and Tony Auth created the “NORB” comic strip about the adventures of an eccentric inventor, a neighboring teenage girl, and a wooly mammoth. In an attempt to recreate the golden age comics, each installment furthered a longer narrative instead of just cracking a joke a day. It was not well-received and died after 52 weeks.
“The hate mail was extreme,” Pinkwater said. “There was no positive mail at all except two letters, one each from Jules Feiffer and Chaim Potok.''
Pinkwater was a regular public radio contributor, known for his humorous takes. In addition to his commentaries, his 1996 reading of The Devil in the Drain on This American Life supposedly led to the title being banned or challenged in some libraries.
