BACKING INTO FORWARD. By Jules Feiffer. Nan. A. Talese / Doubleday, 2010. 464 pages, photographs. $30 hardcover.

Jules Feiffer is one of our icons in the hall of fame that includes Mike Wallace, Beverly Sills, Bill Styron and Walter Cronkite. Island icons are colossi in the big wide world, and brand-makers of the Vineyard as a place that harbors the rich and famous and give-backers to the community. The billionaires who build bulgy houses come and go.

They might be super helpful in the charity business, but we won’t forgive them their Brobdingnagian homes. Even Jackie O came and went: we succored her, but she rarely, if ever, succored us.

But Jules Feiffer lives here, as much as he possibly can he donates his insanely identifiable drawings to auctions, and for decades he’s helped, just by being here, to promote the Vineyard as a place virtually sinking under the weight of the prodigiously talented. And now he has written an autobiography, Backing Into Forward, to expose the inner Jules.

Well, not so fast. We’re treated to the American urban landscape that made him the ambivalent, neurotic, desperately seeking, politically zealous, lusting and tortured individual that has, for decades, cried out for understanding in his comics, the comics that began in the Village Voice in the late 50s and syndicated their way to scores of newspapers coast to coast. Single-handedly, Jules Feiffer introduced his countrymen to the above-mentioned neurotic personality, and made it easier for those of the same persuasion to take our place at the table (just so long as we’re not allergic to anything being served.)

But what about the personal Jules who married twice, divorced (of course) once, sired two daughters, first one, Kate, our homegrown author of six children’s books, then Halley, an ascendant actress? He then went on to adopt baby Julie, now in her teens, and he’s on hand to cherish the next generation in Kate’s daughter, Maddy, a student at the Oak Bluffs School. Mr. Feiffer certainly proffers names, vital data and zip codes, but he remains circumspect: Wives are left to their quirks and secrets, as perhaps they asked to be left. Kids are cute and a pain in the behind, but we all know that. No, the tale Mr. Feiffer has to tell is all about his original horrifying family, early days in the Bronx, decades of American cultural clashes, political mayhem, and the art that came out of his travails. It’s a glorious and fascinating trip, and one that answers the age old question, do artists suffer more than ordinary folk, and the answer is, you betcha!

Jules Feiffer was born in New York in 1929. His father, Dave, was a businessman-manqué, who never encountered a job, a store, or managerial position at which he failed to fail egregiously. His mother, Rhoda, supported the family of five by selling fashion drawings at three bucks a pop in downtown Manhattan. In some ways typical of the women of her ethnicity, timeframe and environs, she was the smothering Jewish mother, narcissistic, armed with scare tactics and obsessive control, and totally withholding in affection and praise.

Jules Feiffer was also obsessive. He was born to draw. His cartoon creations began on the sidewalks where he lived when he was eight years old. He kept on drawing, muscling his way into his high school newspaper, and finally, when all his peers trekked off to college, he apprenticed himself to the studio of Will Eisner, noted cartoonist of the 30s and 40s. Then came a road trip to Los Angeles and, with the Korean War machine in full force, induction into the army where he avoided basic training by setting up a business customizing officers’ helmet liners. He also spent a lot of time fantasizing about women and bemoaning the dire results, as outlined in the Stones’ song some years later, “I can’t get no satisfaction. I can’t get no girly action.”

Mr. Feiffer’s setbacks and rejections, relational and professional, are legion and, fame-be-damned, never-ending. The memoirist takes us through these agonies in excruciating yet thoroughly engrossing detail; if Jules Feiffer can endure the mills of the gods grinding slowly, then so can we. So what if Mike Nichols, close friend, never got back to him about a play entitled Little Murders? It hurt, but all he needed to do to cope was to stay out of touch for a number of years until he and Nichols collaborated on a seminal late 60s, men vs. women movie, Carnal Knowledge.

But back to the character-building, scary Jewish mother. As the cartoonist put it, “I’ve lied to my mother all my adult life and the better half of my teenage life. The choice was either lying to her or never seeing her again.” (She died, as did his father, in 1963.) In the Village Voice of December 1958, Mr. Feiffer ran what he believed to be the first Jewish mother cartoon, an eight-panel face of a pinched-faced elderly woman spouting guilt, guilt and more guilt.

Mr. Feiffer writes in his memoir, “I took great pains in drawing this cartoon.” He subjected it to draft after draft, eviscerating any resemblance to Rhoda Feiffer. “I took it down to the Village Voice on a Monday and looked for it when the paper came out that Wednesday. And in my regular spot on page five, running across the bottom of the page, there was my strip, and it was an eight-panel portrait of my mother. “How could I have screwed up so monumentally?”

Mr. Feiffer takes us through the depths of suffering dealt him by life itself, and the unexpected heights of fame. He writes about his 1959 crossing of the Atlantic on the Queen Elizabeth to meet adoring fans in London, avid for his comic strip, Sick, Sick, Sick. He and his agent, Ted Riley, decked in tuxedos, share the sumptuous, armchair-studded screening room with Cary Grant. Afterwards they “retreated for a nightcap to the top of the top deck. Unless you climbed a smokestack, you could go no higher. We sat on bar stools in the quiet and under-attended Veranda Grill, sipping Pimm’s Cups, observing another insomniac passenger looking far more elegant in black tie than we did. He was fooling around on the piano, playing Duke Ellington. And why not? He was Duke Ellington.”

If you can hold in your mind the density and insight, the hair-pulling and chest-beating, the flash of inspiration-soon-to-be-deflated and existential despair compressed into a single comic of Jules Feiffer’s, then imagine the journey into the interior on which you’ll be embarking in this 440-page memoir. Prepare for total immersion in Depression-era New York streets, lefty politics, the ups and downs of the cartoon trade, the lights of Broadway, the razzle-dazzle insanity of the movie business, and the joys and sorrows of the artist’s soul that longs for a hearing.

Mr. Feiffer sums up his oeuvre and his contribution to American letters when he writes about an early breakthrough, “What if I introduced the ‘I’ voice to my readers in the form of eight-or-ten-panel monologues — unwinding, self-serving kvetches in which my ‘I’ character gives away more than he means to, exposes what he’d rather kept hidden. It could be comic strip psychotherapy, laugh while you wince, wince as you laugh.”

You will do plenty of each in this explosive, psychoanalytic book-length monologue. It may be one of the most important memoirs you’ll ever read, especially if you’re a writer or an artist. You’ll also need to reach for a James Lee Burke or a Robert Parker when you’ve finished, just so you can learn to breathe and read normally again, and to stop wincing and laughing, laughing and wincing. You could strain a rib.