PAUL KUPPERBERG: It’s the seminal book’s 60th ANNIVERSARY… By PAUL KUPPERBERG If all Jules Feiffer (January 26, 1929 – January 17, 2025) had done was the 41 years (1956 – 1997) of the weekly comic strip Feiffer for The Village Voice, it would have been enough. If all Jules Feiffer had done was write more than 35 books, plays, and screenplays, including Harry the Rat With Women (1963), Little Murders (1967), and Carnal Knowledge (1971), it would have been enough. If all Jules Feiffer had done was win an Academy Award in 1961 for his short animated film Munro, or be awarded the 1986 Pulitzer Prize for political cartoons, or in 2004 be inducted into the Comic Book Hall of Fame and receive the National Cartoonists Society’s Milton Caniff Lifetime Achievement Award, or Lifetime Achievement Awards from the Writers Guild of America (2010) and the Dramatists Guild of America (2023), it would have been enough. And if all Jules Feiffer had done was pen his autobiography, Backing Into Forward: A Memoir (2010) about his remarkable life and career, it would have been enough… but Jules Feiffer also “compiled, introduced, and annotated The Great Comic Book Heroes — released 60 years ago, on Nov. 15, 1965 — one of the most influential books about comics for a couple of generations of comic book creators. In 1965, the Golden Age of Comics (let’s call it 1935 – 1956) wasn’t that far in the past, but when it came to the availability of Golden Age stories, it might as well have been in a different century. DC and Marvel might occasionally publish a Golden Age reprint in an 80-Page Giant or annual, but old comic books were hard to come by and even when you did find them, those issues could cost $2, $3, even $5 a pop. Younger readers like me (I was born in 1955) were teased with revivals of the heroes of the Golden Age or references to the past in letter columns, but with few exceptions, the stories themselves remained elusive… and then came The Great Comic Book Heroes! My friend Steve and I discovered the book in the Utica Avenue branch of the Brooklyn Public Library in early 1968. This hardcover coffee-table book (first published by Dial Press) with a dustjacket emblazoned with an image of the...