Jules Feiffer.
The Man in the Ceiling. New York:
Michael di Capua Books,
HarperCollins, 1993.
Call Number:
(Curriculum Library) F2967m

Curriculum Library, UWM Libraries

Original art for the cover as it was published.

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Two pages from a manuscript draft for The Man in the Ceiling and Jules Feiffer’s signed note to his publisher Michael di Capua.

In writing his first novel for young readers, Feiffer was uncertain to whom he should submit his story. So, he turned to his friend Maurice Sendak for advice. As a highly successful writer and illustrator of children’s literature, Sendak was well qualified to offer such advice. Sendak recommended Michael di Capua, who worked for HarperCollins. When di Capua read the manuscript for The Man in the Ceiling, he called Feiffer and remarked that he had been waiting 25 years for this book. “[di Capua] was so flattering and so sweet about it, but by the end of our conversation I realized I had to rewrite the whole book. And I did.

“[di Capua] doesn’t give . . . specifics. He was giving me a theoretical base on how to write a chapter book for children. It was so helpful that it . . . enhanced the thinking I had been doing . . . but gave it a shape and a vividness that it hadn’t had before, so that I could go back and rewrite it. Once I figured out what his philosophy was--and agreed with it completely--it told me that I had to do everything over.”

“The most interesting and challenging part of illustrating the book was that it essentially required two illustrators: me doing the illustrations for the story, and Jimmy Jibbett illustrating his own comic strips. To impersonate Jimmy Jibbett, I had to go back to one of those early comics that my mother had saved that I drew from the age of seven or eight. I tried to imitate not just the style of drawing, but also the style of writing, because when kids read the book--and this was my major concern--I didn’t want this to be seen as a parody or a pastiche, I wanted it to look like and feel like the real thing—that a ten-year-old reading this would think that a ten-year-old wrote and drew it.”

Original illustrations that do not appear in The Man in the Ceiling. Left: Jimmy Jibbett’s father. Center: Jimmy Jibbett’s mother. Right: cartoon superhero Undersized Man.

Undersized Man is actually from another Feiffer series of cartoons, “Flawed Superheroes.” Undersize Man does not appear in the book, but Mini Man, The Smallest Man Alive, does beginning on page 18.

Early original drawing illustrating Jimmy Jibbett’s fear of baseball. Not used in the book.

Paste-up illustrating Jimmy Jibbett’s fear of baseball as it appears on page 40.

At the beginning of his children’s-book career, Feiffer did all his sketches and drawings on 8.5 x 11 bond paper, a practice he abandoned before he began work on Meanwhile.