Jules Feiffer on his and other cartoonists' view of comic strips as art

GROTH: Were your parents proud in any sense that you were a cartoonist, that you were working on an art form that you were developing?
FEIFFER: Oh, it was never thought of as an art form by anybody in those years. Including cartoonists. I remember Walt Kelly's hackles would rise if you talked about cartooning as an art form.
GROTH: Oh, is that right?
FEIFFER: Oh, yes.
GROTH: Do you think he believed that?
FEIFFER: It's hard to know what these guys believed. I mean, they came out of the newspaper gang, where artists were sissies in a way, and they were proud of being newspapermen, journalists, working in bullpens. And doing work that was disposable. As Caniff has said, you never thought twice about having your originals thrown out.
GROTH: I was under the impression that in the 20s and '30s, the time when Herriman was working, and Segar, and McCay that it was thought of as an art form.
FEIFFER: No. I don't know what McCay would have thought, and who knows about Herriman? But most of them didn't think twice about that. I always thought of it as an art form. My love for Eisner, my love for Caniff, I always thought these guys were artists, and when I brought it up, they got very defensive.
GROTH: What did they think of themselves as, then? Craftsmen?
FEIFFER: Yeah. "This is my job. I'm a cartoonist. What's all this big deal about art?" Something vaguely unmanly about it.
GROTH: How did Eisner look at it?
FEIFFER: Same way. Eisner now accepts the term "artist" but he certainly didn't when I was working for him and tried to use it.
GROTH: Did he reject it?
FEIFFER: Sure, he rejected it entirely. He would admit that. That's not going to be discomforting to him. He remembers those arguments.

[This is interesting, given how strongly Eisner pushed for people to see comics as art in his later years. I guess Feiffer must have had a big influence on him in that regard.]