SOURCE: An introduction and afterword in The Great Comic Book Heroes, edited by Jules Feiffer, The Dial Press, 1965, pp. 11-45, 185-89.

In the following excerpt, Feiffer offers opinions about the comic strips of his childhood, their artists and publishers, and the controversies they inspired during the 1930s and 1940s.

I

Comic books, World War II, the depression, and I all got going at roughly the same time. I was eight. Detective Comics was on the stands, Hitler was in Spain, and the middle class (by whose employment record we gauge depressions) was, after short gains, again out of work. I mention these items in tandem, not only to give color to the period, but as a sly historic survey to those in our own time who, of the items cited, only know of comic books.

Eight was a bad age for me. Only a year earlier I had...