| Jules Feiffer | |
|---|---|
 Feiffer in 1958 | |
| Born | (1929-01-26)January 26, 1929 New York City, U.S. |
| Died | January 17, 2025(2025-01-17) (aged 95) Richfield Springs, New York, U.S. |
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Notable works | |
| Awards |
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| Spouse(s) | |
| Children | 3, includingHalley |
Jules Ralph Feiffer (/ˈfaɪfər/FY-fər;[1] January 26, 1929 – January 17, 2025) was an American cartoonist and author, who at one time was considered the most widely read satirist in the country.[2] He won thePulitzer Prize in 1986 foreditorial cartooning, and in 2004 he was inducted into theComic Book Hall of Fame. He wrote the animated shortMunro, which won anAcademy Award for Best Animated Short Film in 1961. TheLibrary of Congress has recognized his "remarkable legacy", from 1946 to the present, as a cartoonist, playwright, screenwriter, adult and children's book author, illustrator, andart instructor.[3]
When Feiffer was 17 (in the mid-1940s) he became assistant to cartoonistWill Eisner. There he helped Eisner write and illustrate his comic strips, includingThe Spirit. In 1956, he became a staff cartoonist atThe Village Voice, where he produced the weekly comic strip titledFeiffer until 1997. His cartoons became nationally syndicated in 1959 and then appeared regularly in publications including theLos Angeles Times, theLondon Observer,The New Yorker,Playboy,Esquire, andThe Nation. In 1997, he created the first op-ed page comic strip forThe New York Times, which ran monthly until 2000.
Feiffer wrote more than 35 books, plays, and screenplays. His first of many collections of satirical cartoons,Sick, Sick, Sick, was published in 1958, and his first novel,Harry, the Rat With Women, in 1963. In 1965, he wroteThe Great Comic Book Heroes, the first history of the comic-book superheroes of the late 1930s and early 1940s and a tribute to their creators. In 1979, Feiffer created his first graphic novel,Tantrum. By 1993, he began writing and illustrating books aimed at young readers, with several of them winning awards.
Feiffer began writing for the theater and film in 1961, with plays includingLittle Murders (1967),Feiffer's People (1969), andKnock Knock (1976). He wrote the screenplay forCarnal Knowledge (1971), directed byMike Nichols, andPopeye (1980), directed byRobert Altman. At the time of his death, he was working on a visual memoir.
Feiffer was born inThe Bronx, New York City, on January 26, 1929.[4][5] His parents were David Feiffer and Rhoda (née Davis), and Feiffer was raised in a Jewish household with a younger and an older sister.[6] His father was usually unemployed in his work as a salesman due to the Depression. His mother was a fashion designer who made watercolor drawings of her designs which she sold to various clothing manufacturers in New York. "She'd go door to door selling her designs for $3," recalled Feiffer. The fact that she was the breadwinner, however, created an "atmosphere of silent blame" in the home. Feiffer began drawing at the age of 3. "My mother always encouraged me to draw", he said.[7]
When he was 13, his mother gave him a drawing table for his bedroom. She also enrolled him in theArt Students League of New York to study anatomy. He graduated fromJames Monroe High School in 1947.[8] He won aJohn Wanamaker Art Contest medal for acrayon drawing of theradioWestern heroTom Mix.[9] He wrote in 1965 about his childhood:
I came to the field with a more serious intent than my opiate-minded contemporaries. While they, in those pre-super days, were eating up "Cosmo, Master of Disguise"; "Speed Saunders"; and "Bart Regan Spy", I was counting up how many panels there were to a page, how many pages there were to a story – learning how to form, for my own use, phrases like: @X#?/; marking for future reference which comic book hero was swiped from which radio hero: Buck Marshall from Tom Mix; theCrimson Avenger fromThe Green Hornet ...[9]
Feiffer said that cartoons were his first interest when young, "what I loved the most."[10] He stated that because he couldn't write well enough to be a writer, or draw well enough to be an artist, he realized that the best way to succeed would be to combine his limited talents in each of those fields to create something unique.[10] He read comic strips from various newspapers which his father brought home, and was mostly attracted to the way they told stories. "What I loved best about these comics was that they created a very personal world in which almost anything could take place", Feiffer said. "And readers would accept it even if it had nothing to do with any other kind of world. It was the fantasy world I loved."[10]
Among his favorite cartoons wereOur Boarding House,Alley Oop andWash Tubbs.[11] He began to decipher features of different cartoonists, such as the sentimentalnaturalism ofAbbie an' Slats, the [Preston]Sturges-like characters and plots of others, with cadenced dialogue. He recalls thatWill Eisner'sSpirit rivaled them in structure. And no strip, except [Milton]Caniff'sTerry [and the Pirates], rivaled it in atmosphere."[12]
Feiffer has creditedWalt Kelly,Al Capp,Cliff Sterrett,E.C. Segar, andGeorge Herriman for his works.[13]
Our fights were always collegial. Never once did [Eisner] pull rank on me. I was always amazed by what he let me get away with. It shows how close and tight the relationship was, that he let me do that parody. He had great generosity of soul.
After Feiffer graduated from high school at 16, he was desperate for a job and went unannounced to the office of one of his favorite cartoonists,Will Eisner. Eisner was sympathetic to young Feiffer, as Eisner had been in a similar situation when he first started out. He asked Feiffer, "What can you do?" He answered, "I'll do anything. I'll do coloring, or clean-up, or anything, and I'd like to work for nothing."[14] However, Eisner was unimpressed by Feiffer's art abilities and did not know how he could employ him. Eisner ultimately decided to give him a low-paying job when he found out that Feiffer "knew more about him than anybody who had ever lived," said Feiffer. "He had no choice but to hire me as a groupie."[14]
Eisner considered Feiffer a mediocre artist, but he "liked the kid's spunk and intensity", writes Eisner biographer Michael Schumacher. Eisner was also aware that they both came from similar backgrounds, despite his being twelve years older. They both had fathers who struggled to support their family, and both their mothers were strong figures who held the family together through hardships.[14] "He had a hunger for comics that Eisner rarely saw in artists", notes Schumacher. "Eisner decided that there was something to this wisecracking kid."[14] When Feiffer later asked for a raise, Eisner instead gave him his own page inThe Spirit section, and let him do his own coloring.[8] As Eisner recalled in 1978:
He began working as just a studio man – he would do erasing, cleanup ... Gradually it became very clear that he could write better than he could draw and preferred it, indeed – so he wound up doing balloons [i.e., dialog]. First he was doing balloons based on stories that I'd create. I would start a story off and say, 'Now here I want the Spirit to do the following things – you do the balloons, Jules.' Gradually, he would take over and do stories entirely on his own, generally based on ideas we'd talked about. I'd come in generally with the first page, then he would pick it up and carry it from there.[15]
They collaborated well onThe Spirit, sharing ideas, arguing points, and making changes when they agreed. In 1947, Feiffer also attended thePratt Institute for a year to improve his art style.[14] Over time, Eisner valued Feiffer's opinions and judgments more often, appreciating his "uncanny knack" for capturing the way people talked, without using contrived dialogue. Eisner recalls that Feiffer "had a real ear for writing characters that lived and breathed. Jules was always attentive to nuances, such as sounds and expressions" which made stories seem more real.[14]
After working with Eisner for nearly a decade, he chose to start creating his own comic strips. In 1956, after again first proving his talent by working for free, he became a staff cartoonist atThe Village Voice where he produced a weekly comic strip. Feiffer's strips ran for 42 years, until 1997, at first titledSick Sick Sick, then asFeiffer's Fables, and finally as simplyFeiffer. After a year with theVoice, Feiffer compiled a collection of many of his satire cartoons into a best-selling book,Sick Sick Sick: A Guide to Non-Confident Living (1958), a dissection of popular social and political neuroses. The success of that collection led to his becoming a regular contributor to theLondon Observer andPlayboy magazine.[2] DirectorStanley Kubrick, a fellow Bronx native, invited Feiffer to write a screenplay forSick, Sick, Sick, although the film was never made.[16] After first becoming aware of Feiffer's work, Kubrick wrote him in 1958:
The comic themes you weave are very close to my heart ... I must express unqualified admiration for the scenic structure of your "strips" and the eminently speakable and funny dialog ... I should be most interested in furthering our contact with an eye toward doing a film along the moods and themes you have so brilliantly accomplished.[17]
By April 1959,Feiffer was distributed nationally by theHall Syndicate, initially inThe Boston Globe,Minneapolis Star Tribune,Newark Star-Ledger andLong Island Press.[18][19] Eventually, his strips covered the nation, including magazines, and were published regularly in major publications such as theLos Angeles Times,The New Yorker,Esquire,Playboy andThe Nation. He was commissioned in 1997 byThe New York Times to create its first op-ed page comic strip, which ran monthly until 2000.[20]
Feiffer's cartoons were typically mini-satires, where he portrayed ordinary people's thoughts about subjects such as sex, marriage, violence and politics. Writer Larry DuBois describes Feiffer's cartoon style:
Feiffer had no stories to tell. His main concern was to explore character. In a series of a dozen or so pictures, he would show the shifts of mood that flickered across the faces of men and women as they tried, often vainly, to explain themselves to the world, to their husbands and wives, to their mistresses and lovers, to their employers, to their rulers, or simply to the unseen adversaries at the other end of the telephone wires ...It would be no exaggeration to say that his dialog is as acute as any that is being written in America today. Dialog aimed at sophisticated minds, usually with the purpose of shaking them out of sophistication into real awareness.[10]
Feiffer published the hitSick, Sick, Sick: A Guide to Non-Confident Living in 1958 (which featured a collection of cartoons from about 1950 to 1956), and followed up withMore Sick, Sick, Sick and other strip collections, includingThe Explainers;Boy, Girl. Boy, Girl.;Hold Me!;Feiffer's Album;The Unexpurgated Memoirs of Bernard Mergendeiler;Feiffer on Nixon;Jules Feiffer's America: From Eisenhower to Reagan;Marriage Is an Invasion of Privacy; andFeiffer's Children.Passionella (1957) is a graphic narrative initially anthologized inPassionella and Other Stories, a variation on the story ofCinderella. The protagonist is Ella, a chimney sweep who is transformed into a Hollywood movie star.Passionella was used as one part of the 1966Sheldon Harnick andJerry Bock Broadway musicalThe Apple Tree.[citation needed]
His cartoons, strips and illustrations have been reprinted by Fantagraphics asFeiffer: The Collected Works.Explainers (2008) reprints all of his strips from 1956 to 1966.[18] David Kamp reviewed the book inThe New York Times:
His strip, usually six to eight borderless panels, initially appeared under the titleSick Sick Sick, with the subtitle 'A Guide to Non-Confident Living'. As theLenny Bruce-ish language suggests, the earliest strips are very much of their time, the postwar Age of Anxiety in the big city; you can practically smell the espresso, the unfiltered ciggies, the lanolin whiff of woolly jumpers.[21]
Feiffer has written two novels (1963'sHarry the Rat with Women, 1977'sAckroyd) and several children's books, includingBark, George;Henry, The Dog with No Tail;A Room with a Zoo;The Daddy Mountain; andA Barrel of Laughs, a Vale of Tears. He partnered withThe Walt Disney Company and writerAndrew Lippa to adapt his bookThe Man in the Ceiling into a musical.[22] He illustrated the children's booksThe Phantom Tollbooth andThe Odious Ogre. His non-fiction includes the 1965 bookThe Great Comic Book Heroes.[20]
I want to write about marriage. I think the most interesting story is how men and women get on with each other, the terms they accept to live together and survive together, the compromises they make, the betrayals of themselves and of each other, and how, despite the fact that over and over again they find that it can't possibly work, it still seems to be preferable to anything else they know about. In the end, it becomes rather heroic.
Feiffer also wrote and drew one of the earliestgraphic novels, the hardcoverTantrum (Alfred A. Knopf, 1979),[23] described on its dustjacket as a "novel-in-pictures". Like thetrade paperbackThe Silver Surfer (Simon & Schuster/Fireside Books, August 1978), by Marvel Comics'Stan Lee andJack Kirby, and the hardcover and trade paperback versions ofWill Eisner'sA Contract with God, and Other Tenement Stories (Baronet Books, October 1978), this was published by a traditional book publisher and distributed through bookstores, whereas other early graphic novels, such asSabre (Eclipse Books, August 1978), were distributed through some of the first comic-book stores.
His autobiography,Backing into Forward: A Memoir (Doubleday, 2010), received positive reviews fromThe New York Times[24] andPublishers Weekly, which wrote:
His account of hitchhiking cross-country invadesKerouac territory, while his ink-stained memories of the comics industry rivalMichael Chabon's Pulitzer Prize–winning fictional portrait. Feiffer was drafted into theU.S. Army in 1951 during theKorean War,[25] where he did animation for theSignal Corps.[26] His two years in the military gave Feiffer fodder for the trenchantMunro (about a child who is drafted). Such satirical social and political commentary became the turning point in his lust for fame, which finally happened, after many rejections, when acclaim for his anxiety-riddenVillage Voice strips served as a springboard into other projects.[27]
He has had retrospectives at theNew York Historical Society, theLibrary of Congress andThe School of Visual Arts. His artwork is exhibited at and represented by Chicago's Jean Albano Gallery.[28] In 1996, Feiffer donated his papers and several hundred original cartoons and book illustrations to the Library of Congress.[8]
In 2014, Feiffer publishedKill My Mother: A Graphic Novel throughLiveright Publishing.Kill My Mother was named aVanity Fair Best Book of 2014 and aKirkus Reviews Best Fiction Book of 2014. In 2016, Feiffer publishedCousin Joseph: A Graphic Novel, a prequel toKill My Mother.Cousin Joseph was also published through Liveright Publishing, and was aNew York Times Bestseller, named one ofThe Washington Post's Best Graphic Novels of the Year, and was nominated for theLynd Ward Graphic Novel Prize. A third book in the series,The Ghost Script: A Graphic Novel, was published by Liveright in 2018.[20]
Feiffer's picture book for young readers,Rupert Can Dance, was published byFSG in 2014.
Feiffer's plays includeLittle Murders (1967),Feiffer's People (1969),Knock Knock (1976),Elliot Loves (1990),The White House Murder Case, andGrown Ups.[29] AfterMike Nichols adapted Feiffer's unproduced playCarnal Knowledge as a1971 film, Feiffer scriptedRobert Altman'sPopeye,Alain Resnais'sI Want to Go Home, and the film adaptation ofLittle Murders.[citation needed]
The original production ofHold Me! was directed by Caymichael Patten and opened at The American Place Theatre, Subplot Cafe, as part of its American Humorist Series on January 13, 1977. The production ran on theShowtimecable network in 1981.[8]
Feiffer moved toShelter Island, New York in 2017.[30] He wrote the book for a musical based on a story he wrote earlier,Man in the Ceiling, about a boy cartoonist who learned to pursue his dream despite pressures to conform. The musical was produced and directed byJeffrey Seller in 2017 at the Bay Street Theatre in neighboringSag Harbor, New York.[31][32]
Feiffer was an adjunct professor atStony Brook Southampton. Previously he taught at theYale School of Drama andNorthwestern University. He has been a Senior Fellow at theColumbia University National Arts Journalism Program. He was in residence at theArizona State University Barrett Honors College from November 27 to December 2, 2006. In June–August 2009, Feiffer was in residence as a Montgomery Fellow atDartmouth College, where he taught an undergraduate course on graphic humor in the 20th century.[8]
Feiffer was married three times and had three children. His daughterHalley Feiffer is an actress and playwright.[33] A second daughter, Kate Feiffer, is the author and playwright ofMy Mom Is Trying to Ruin My Life and other works.[34]
His third marriage took place in September 2016, when he married freelance writer JZ Holden; the ceremony combined Jewish and Buddhist traditions.[35] She is the author ofIllusion of Memory (2013).
Feiffer lived inupstate New York with his wife and their two cats.[36] He died from congestive heart failure at his home inRichfield Springs, New York, on January 17, 2025, at the age of 95.[37][38]
Media from Commons
Quotations from Wikiquote
Data from WikidataPulitzer Prize for Editorial Cartooning (1976–2000) | ||
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