Over the course of his nearly 80-year career, Jules Feiffer tried his hand at everything–comic books, political cartoons, editorials, comics history, plays, films, animation, children’s books, graphic novels … and he was hard at work on his next book when he passed away on Jan. 17, just shy of his 96th birthday.
In celebration of Feiffer’s life and legacy, The Comics Journal reached out to some of Feiffer’s friends, colleagues and admirers and asked them to share appreciations and anecdotes from those who knew and loved him.
One of my earliest childhood memories is looking with wonder at Jules Feiffer’s paperbacks. Jules was my mom's favorite cartoonist. His drawings seemed to leap off the page, alive with energy and expression. His incredible body of work became a major inspiration and influence on my own art and life.
Jules excelled at everything he did — and he did everything: comic books, comic strips, theater, movies, children’s books, graphic novels, and so much more. He will forever be the G.O.A.T.
Last year, I had the pleasure to visit Jules at his home in upstate New York. He was hard at work on a graphic memoir. At that point, he had created over 300 pages of stunning, freehand, large-format drawings, each paired with a short, deeply insightful text. It was the work of a true master. In fact, it might be the best work of art he’s ever done. At 95. As I said, an inspiration.
The world will deeply miss his artistry, honesty, and bravery.
Rick Parker (cartoonist)
Jules Feiffer was the most “alive” person I ever met.
Mimi Pond (cartoonist)
Jules Feiffer’s Sick Sick Sick was put in my hot little hands by my parents. I could not have been more than eight years old, so this would have been about 1964. They’d already indoctrinated me with the Signet paperback collections of Harvey Kurtzman’s Mad Magazine just to teach me to read. Sick Sick Sick was all I ever needed to convince me that I, too, could make comics. It was so completely unlike any other comic strips – something, I sensed, very adult and very sophisticated – but the whimsical drawing style that effortlessly captured so many things was a goal to shoot for: part of my plan to move to New York and become a cartoonist that had already formed in my mind.
He was so far ahead of his time with what comics could be that I think it took until Stan Mack came along to pick up the torch – of course what Stan did was very different, but both offered a road map of what, for me, was doable.
Meeting Jules at the 2014 SPX was of course a thrill of a lifetime, and he kindly indulged me when I explained that I’d done a graphic novel set in the late 1970s and tried to articulate to him how fucked-up the 1970s actually were for me and for my generation. Of course for him the 1970s had to have been very different, but to my delight, he agreed. He will always be in the starry firmament of my favorites.
Derf Backderf (cartoonist)
Jules was the only cartoonist to win a Pulitzer Prize, an Eisner Award and an Oscar. He wrote for Will Eisner's The Spirit in the 1940s. He authored novels and plays. He made kids books. He wrote the film Carnal Knowledge. He was an early contributor in the 1950s to The Village Voice, where his iconic sketchy cartoon first made him famous. He was the cartoon voice of the Beat Generation (or maybe the Madmen Generation). He single handedly created the alt-weekly cartoon genre, in which I worked for the bulk of my career.
Not bad for an art school dropout.
His 1965 book The Great Comic Book Heroes was one of the first serious comics histories, back when no one was writing seriously about comics and their impact on culture, and my first glimpse into the then misty Golden Age. I still have my copy.
Incredibly, my hometown paper, The Akron Beacon Journal, ran Feiffer's Voice strip in its Sunday Opinion Section. I meticulously clipped every one as a teenager and saved them in my comics collection.
So it was a great thrill to meet Jules when I was at Ohio State and he visited the Cartoon Museum. I met him several subsequent times over the years, most memorably at the SPX Fest in D.C., where Tom Tomorrow, Ruben Bolling, Shannon Wheeler and I shared a booth in the bar with him as he recounted stories from his incredible life. What an evening! Here's the story I remember most:
In 1968, Jules was having dinner at the Playboy Mansion in Chicago. Yeah, that's right. Hefner was a huge cartoon fan, and published Feiffer cartoons regularly in Playboy. This was the evening the riots at the Democratic National Convention exploded. The dinner guests all gathered around the TV to watch. The mansion was in Old Town, a doable walk to Grant Park where police and protestors were battling. Hefner had the brilliant idea to go there and observe it firsthand. So they all set off, in their dinner jackets and evening gowns. As they approached the park, they were stopped by some of Mayor Daley's goon cops, who ordered them to go home. Hefner insisted they had a right to continue, and the cop dropped him with a billy club to the side of the head! Jules and the others had to carry a bloodied Hef back to the Mansion.
"That was the moment Hefner became a liberal!" said Jules.
What a life. What a giant.
Safe travels, Jules. Thanks for all you gave us.
I did hang out with him once and he told the story of how the Chicago cops made Hefner turn into a liberal.
Matt Bors has a funny story of getting on the same bus as him and going up to tell him he was a political cartoonist too. Feiffer looked up and said, “So?”
I've heard it said that in comics you're either a greater writer than an illustrator, or a greater illustrator than a writer. In my experience that's mostly true – with a few exceptions of course. Feiffer was one of those exceptions.
Obviously his humor-writing, observations, commentaries and storytelling were powerful and timeless, but his drawings were a radiant joy to look at. Jules had developed, and perhaps partly pioneered a studied-but-loose style with his cartooning, which I covet greatly. His cartoons had a raw immediacy which visually communicated a quick joke or casual story. Take a look at Sick Sick Sick, or The Explainers, or Passionella, or Munro. Look at his characters’ gestures, their moods and Jules's strip layouts; what's drawn, what's suggested and what's completely missing. He was a master at cartooning. There's a lot to learn!
On top of all of that, Feiffer's career is something to be in awe of, to aspire to, and to be deeply envious of. He did it all, screenwriting, illustration, comic strips, books, children's books, books that were adapted to the screen and stage ....
Anyway, Jules's genius was in his cleverness and he never lost that. He never stopped moving, and experimenting. How can one artist spend a long life better than that?
I want to say that Jules Feiffer epitomized “something”, but it’s impossible. Because he created so much that he’s impossible to pin down. He told stories for children, for teens, for adults. Wrote plays, books and movies. He toiled in drama, politics, and humor. He was all over the place. But at every turn, at every stop, with everything he created he was always inescapably Feiffer.
Whether through dialogue or prose or his cartoons, he always had a looseness. A fluidity. It was always so very, very much him. And he never stopped. He was a tsunami of creativity.
And I don’t know if it’s nearly said enough because of how prolific he was, but he was really goddamn funny.
My actual interaction with Jules Feiffer was limited to eating bagels with him at the Small Press Expo in 2014. Even though our paths barely crossed in real life, Feiffer clearly blazed the trail for my entire genre of multi-panel social commentary cartoons. He wrote his characters' dialogues with admirable sensitivity and compassion. His work opened a door for all other artists who followed in the pages of the Village Voice and similar newspapers.
I got to know Jules 30 years ago through John Carls, an executive producer in LA who also worked with Maurice Sendak. We were discussing making Jules' book The Man In The Ceiling into an animated TV series with Linda Simensky at the Nickelodeon network. That never came about unfortunately, but I got to know him in the process. It was our mutual love of Will Eisner's The Spirit, and comics/cartoons in general made for a fun and lasting friendship! I also sent him a photograph that my dad took of me in 1965 (when I was 10 years old), with Jules's book, The Great Comic Book Heroes. I had fallen asleep while reading it and my dad thought it was a great thing to capture.
Jules immediately wrote back:
JJ, That’s wonderful ! And that you have a father you can share with, instead of Jewish fathers of my generation, who were set up by Moms as rivals to their sons, so there was always an edge of competitive put-downism. All my life I yearned for a real conversation with my father — a truly sweet man, when not rivaling — and losing out – to his son. We never had that conversation.
I envy your relationship with your father. In dreams, I talk to mine, and our relationship has improved considerably. On the other hand, my mother, who was the powerhouse, and without whose encouragement, I would never have dared to be a cartoonist — she, I seldom ever think of, or dream about.
One vital reason I took on The Great Comic Book Heroes was to write an appreciation of Eisner and The Spirit. He was completely forgotten, and it was a major part of my job on that book, to bring him back from the dead.
And it worked.
And nevertheless, I still owe him.
Inventing a genre of cartooning, the one in which I’ve made my cartooning career, is only one of the incredible achievements of Jules Feiffer. I’m sure other contributors to this tribute will better describe his contributions to comic books, graphic novels, comic strips, book illustration, picture books, writing, playwriting, screenwriting, etc.
Whenever I’d see him, he was charming and gregarious. He knew his role as elder statesman, and he could hold court with the best of them. Whether regaling a group of those who followed him into the world of alternative weekly cartooning over beers, or walking with me through a museum exhibit of The Spirit original art, explaining exactly what Will Eisner drew and what he or other assistants worked on or drew.
As great a writer as Jules was, I was always amazed at his facility at drawing. When my kids were little, I took them to a public reading Jules was doing of his children’s book, Bark, George (one of their favorites). My jaw dropped as he essentially re-drew the entire book on an easel, telling the story and ripping pages off the giant pad as he went. He drew so fast, but with such great, improvised, fluid artistry. The line just flew out of his pen.
A New York City newbie in the late 1970s, I discovered the work of Jules Feiffer in the ubiquitous Village Voice. His expressive, light line and sequential delivery were inspirational: particularly for me, his dancing woman. A wonderful creation of Jules', she was captivating to this young cartoonist. Through her, Jules showed us the intertwining nature of the political and the lived life. I marveled at his grasp of line, anatomy and voice.
And then, the fact that this female character was conceived by a male cartoonist: I instantly fell in love with the man and his work.
At an event sometime in the very early 1980s, I found myself walking near Jules. I gathered courage and said, “Hello, Jules, I'm Liza Donnelly." He responded in what I came to know as his deadpan, dry delivery, "I know who you are, Liza." I had arrived. We would continue to run into each other at dinner parties; he was funny and always kind to me. His many creations will keep him with us; for me, it will be Jules' joyful, confused and expressive dancing woman.
Jules Feiffer. Where to begin? Lifelong hero, cartoonist, author and playwright, novelist and screenwriter, all-around innovator and genius, Jules Feiffer, has departed. Now, he made it almost to 96. That’s an incredible run. And I’ve often said when people live that long we should just celebrate what a great long life they had rather than mourn their exit.
But not in this case. In this case I will mourn. Deeply.
Feiffer was one of the first cartoonists whose work I ever noticed (alongside other giants Gahan Wilson, Al Capp, Charles Schulz and Walt Kelly). My dad had two of his cartoon collections, Sick Sick Sick, and Feiffer’s Marriage Manual. I looked at those books so often – and I’m talking from about the age of four onward. His loose, yet controlled, totally spontaneous-seeming art. So simple and yet so expressive. It contained and depicted everything it needed to. And it communicated to me on a deep level. Like, all the way to my bone marrow. And I had no idea what was going on. I couldn’t really read and understand it, but I knew on a molecular level that this was work that I loved. Work that spoke to me. And as I grew older, and did begin reading and maturing, and began to comprehend things, it affected me even more strongly.
The years moved forward, and I devoured his work. Even more than Carnal Knowledge, his movie Little Murders spoke to me. So dark, so deep. So New York. This was a New York I recognized. It has what I consider to be the greatest speech in any movie I’ve ever seen, when Elliot Gould, as the damaged. and emotionally shut-down protagonist, Alfred, talks to his girlfriend Patsy (Marcia Rodd) about his days in college. It’s not what you think if you haven’t seen it. It’s not a “those were the days” speech. It’s where I learned the word “unformidable.” It’s incredible writing.
Fast-forward a little bit further, and I finally get to meet the man. He’s visiting Harvey Kurtzman’s cartooning class at SVA. Harvey takes questions from the students, written on slips of paper, to keep it less chaotic. Harvey reads mine aloud, which happens to be about Feiffer’s novel, Ackroyd, a kind of existential mystery novel. Feiffer demands to know who wrote the question, all of which were submitted anonymously. I raise my hand, and he says to me, almost in challenge, “You actually read it? Even my wife couldn’t read it!” He then asked if I liked it, and I did, very much.
But see, he showed me that you can be a cartoonist and a novelist! And a screenwriter! And a playwright! And whatever the hell else you want to be. You didn’t have to stay in a box. His characters didn’t! That was another thing about his comic strips – no panel borders. No one in a box other than one of their own making! He portrayed characters that wrestled so hard with life. So hard with the things that pain us.
Even more years later, he so kindly and generously gave me a blurb for one of my books. And he really liked the book. And that mattered so much to me. What a validation! What a benediction! We went out to lunch and it was incredible. At some point I mentioned we had met before, those decades earlier, in Harvey’s class. I said I asked him about Ackroyd. And he said, “You’re that one!” I guess it stuck with him. I wanted to pursue the friendship more, but he was a busy man, he traveled to his other home and we never managed it again. An email here and there. I put the blame on myself. But he was a legend. In a way, like Harvey before him, he was too much of a legend for me to feel worthy of socializing with. That’s on me. That’s my neurosis. And Feiffer was the king of depicting people with neuroses. And a very, very nice man. Generous. I’ve never started crying while writing one of these, but this one is the exception. I’m gonna stop.
Thank you, Jules.
I would happily say that Jules Feiffer was a pioneer; a purveyor of humor, wisdom and lyrical lessons through profound words and pictures.
Jules Feiffer passed away on Jan. 17, nine days shy of his 96th birthday. Nonetheless, he was focused and productive until the end, so I — and many others — were still taken by surprise at the news.
There have been numerous comprehensive obituaries for him in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Comics Journal and many other places. Instead of me repeating what they say, here are some memories of the friendship I was lucky enough to have with Jules.
My first memory of Jules was the same as that of many members of my generation: the appearance of his book The Great Comic Book Heroes. I don’t know how I heard about it — but somehow I and all my comics-loving friends knew it was coming. It was the holiday gift for 1965, and I (subtly, I’m sure) let my parents know I wanted it for Chanukah. I got it. I read and reread it many times over the years. (It was eventually so worn and tattered that, when I brought it to Jules 44 years later to be autographed, he inscribed it, “Buy a new book, for Christ’s sakes!”)
My actual friendship with him, though, began with a fax machine.
In 2006, I wanted to interview him for my book, Disguised as Clark Kent: Jews Comics and the Creation of the Superhero. Since Jules was among the first to write about the Jewish perspective on comics history and content, he was a natural person for me to interview. As it turned out, we lived very close to each other on Manhattan’s upper west side. But I had no way to get in touch with him.
Jules did have a website, but if you sent a note to the contact email given there, he was unlikely to respond. (He was born in 1929, after all.)
I finally figured out how to get directly to his assistant, who told me to send Jules a fax. Even in 2006, no one was using faxes besides doctors’ offices.
So I sent him a fax and made a point of dropping Will Eisner’s name in it. (I knew Eisner a little.)
Five minutes later, the phone rang (my landline, of course). “Hello, this is Jules Feiffer.” Which is how I got to meet and interview the founder of superhero comics history and the inventor of the Minsk Theory of Krypton.
That interview led to our 2009 event at the Yiddishist YIVO Institute, where I was to interview him as part of my “Comics and the Jewish-American Dream” series. (Harvey Pekar and Al Jaffee were the interview subjects for the two other nights of the series.) I came prepared with a long list of questions. I started reciting them when Jules interrupted: “If you’re just gonna read from a piece of paper, what the hell do I need you for?”
I threw the questions over my shoulder and off we went. And, of course, he was brilliant and hilarious.
Another event memory: In his terrific memoir Backing Into Forward (if you haven’t read it, stop right now and order a copy), Jules mentions that he and Philip Roth used to do comedy routines together at parties. When I asked him, at an interview I was doing with him at Columbia University, what they were like, his response would be, “We were too drunk. I don’t remember.” I would nag him from time to time, “Why don’t you get your pal Roth to do a panel together and I’ll moderate.” He replied, “Never mind Roth. Put me together on a panel with Hasen.”
Hasen was diminutive dynamo Irwin Hasen, co-creator of Wildcat and early Wonder Woman artist, best known for his decades writing and drawing the Dondi newspaper strip. Everyone knows that Jules famously worked for and admired Spirit creator Will Eisner, starting his career as an unpaid assistant in Eisner’s studio, ending up as the co-creator of some of the best loved Spirit stories. But few people know or remember that Jules also admired — and loved — Irwin. Irwin, like Jules, was hilariously funny and he and Jules brought out the best in each other. An event with the two of them was arranged and held at the old Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art. I moderated — or something like that. These two were forces of nature, after all. There was a bottle of scotch involved.
Then there was the time I was giving a talk on Eisner at Columbia and Jules attended. I was standing there speaking at the front of the lecture hall, talking about the classic Spirit story, “Ten Minutes,” showing the artwork on a screen behind me. A few minutes in, Jules raised his hand. “Yes, Jules.” “Y’know, I wrote that story when I was 17.” If I didn’t know that before, I knew it then.
I continued with my talk, but the audience members kept throwing questions at Jules. And, of course, it seemed a little silly for me to be pontificating about the story when the writer was sitting right there. So I said, “I’m gonna sit down for a while, Jules, and you can take questions about ‘Ten Minutes.’” (It should be noted that Jules was always quick to credit Eisner as at least the co-writer of the Spirit stories he wrote, claiming he was only emulating/channeling Eisner.)
I also recall sitting in a diner on the Upper West Side with a bunch of other comics folks, listening to Jules recount the story of his testifying at one of Lenny Bruce’s obscenity trials. That was history being recounted by someone who helped make it, keeping his listeners on the edge of our seats. It doesn’t get better than that.
And I’d be remiss to not recall the time I went out to visit Jules when he was living in the Hamptons. I was on a dual mission: to interview him for a never-finished documentary series about comics I was working on with a couple of filmmaker pals, and to pick up a piece of art he was going to lend for the “Will Eisner’s New York” exhibition at the old Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art (MoCCA) that I co-curated with Denis Kitchen. There was a related exhibit in the same space called “Inspired by Eisner,” and the art was intended for that.
But Jules couldn’t find the piece he was going to loan us. “I’ll draw you a new one,” he said. And he did. (It’s “The Spirit as Feiffer Dancer” image you may have seen on the internet, or even at the exhibition.) It was easier for him to draw a new image than to spend time trying to find the old one. That was pretty damn impressive.
And then there was the time I mentioned to him that I was doing a project about Jack Ruby. Without missing a beat, Jules made the traditional gun gesture with his thumb and first two fingers, which he jabbed into my chest as he exclaimed, “Bang!” I ended up using a Jules quote about Ruby for the book’s epigraph. Because, of course.
Maybe the theme of all the above is that it was fun to be around Jules Feiffer. It was also entertaining and inspiring and hilarious. But for all his accomplishments—the comics, the Feiffer strip, the kids books, the screenplays, the stage plays, the graphic novels—he never made you feel that he was some sort of lofty figure who was above you. He took it for granted you were his peer.
Jules was someone who, from the moment you met him, made you feel like you’d known him forever, like you were sitting across a table from him at Elaine’s, the legendary east side writers’ hangout, sharing a drink. He made his readers feel that way, too. What a gift it was that we had him for more than 95 years.
Jules was a longtime member of the Berndt Toast Gang. It was his friendship with founding member, the inimitable, Creig Flessel, that brought Jules to the BTG. Jules would meet up with the Gang whenever he was out this way visiting his sister.
I originally knew his name solely from his work in the Village Voice. I didn’t realize just how accomplished he was until we met. Playwright, screenwriter, children’s book author/illustrator and graphic novelist (at 85!). Jules was always gracious and funny. He sent a special invitation to members of the Berndt Toast Gang to attend the premiere of his play, The Man in the Ceiling. Based on his childhood and the events that inspired him to become a cartoonist. I believe most of us who decide to become cartoonists do so at a young age. Jules’ book certainly reflects my own life choice, not great at sports, not great at school, but I loved to draw.
Jules' signed copies of the Kill My Mother trilogy occupy a special place on my studio book shelf.
I knew Jules’s work since childhood, of course. My parents bought me The Phantom Tollbooth, and when I was a teen I read his comic weekly in the Village Voice.
But it was in 2010 that our paths crossed, when he was invited to speak at Columbia. We sat next to each other at the post-talk dinner and discovered our mutual passion for Golden Age Hollywood. We talked about film and politics and comics (he’d grown up loving Gasoline Alley but said that it wasn’t until the Chris Ware-edited collections that he’d realized it was the first graphic novel).
He invited me out to Southampton, and we had lunch and talked and talked and he showed me his half-finished book, Kill My Mother. When the Southampton Museum displayed all the pages from that work in a massive room, I went out to walk through it with him, and to talk about everything and anything.
I remember one visit to him when we lost track of time in a diner and suddenly realized we had about 10 minutes to make a 15-minute drive to the last Hampton Jitney of the evening. We careered madly through dark rainy streets. I joked that it felt like we were in an issue of Eisner’s Spirit, and he agreed, laughing.
We met at events, at dinners, at exhibitions of his work. I involved him in as many things as I could.
When he moved from Southampton, it became more and more difficult to get out to visit (no car, no license). I hadn’t seen him since before the pandemic. I knew he was working hard on something.
I’d give anything to give him one last hug.
There are people whose lives are too large to do justice to. We lost Jules Feiffer, not unexpectedly at 95, but undoubtedly in the middle of his next creative project.
Jules might have been the first or second daring writer in American comic books. The Spirit stories he collaborated with Will Eisner on pushed the limits of the medium, in ways few were brave enough to try for decades later.
Jules was largely responsible for opening the eyes of my generation to the history of comics, and creating the category of comics history with The Great Comic Book Heroes. He was witness to the beginning, and shared the experience.
Jules produced an early and largely overlooked graphic novel in Tantrum, published virtually simultaneously with A Contract with God or Sabre. At an age when most creators have long retired, or frozen in style and form, he took on the fresh challenge of doing a graphic novel series in the niche of his childhood idols … and that was in his mid ‘80s.
Never mind his children’s books, animation, film scripts, editorial cartoons, plays … all the things that earned him a shelf of the greatest awards: Pulitzer, Oscar, Obie, Eisner, Caniff … and I’m undoubtedly missing many.
He remained one of the sharpest minds I ever encountered, never mind the sharpest wit, his curiosity sparking him to call with a question that sent me scurrying to greater experts in the last year or so.
I was honored to be his interviewer at a couple of events, and even more to be his friend.
The angels are learning beautiful new poses as Feiffer Dancers, and our world is less wise and witty today.
He was the original. He was getting underpaid by the alt-weeklies DECADES before any of the rest of us were. But he showed us the way: Branch out. Hollywood. Theater. Children's books. Graphic novels. Art exhibitions.
Feiffer was truly the one who forged the path.
Jules Feiffer showed me that cartoons could be both sharp and deeply personal. His expressive lines and bold satire redefined what comics could do, inspiring generations to push beyond simple gags into meaningful storytelling. His influence on cartooning is immeasurable, setting a standard we still strive to reach.
It was 2005, and we had a big National Cartoonists Society get together at the Overlook Bar in Midtown. For weeks I called any cartoonist whose phone number I had and invited them to a day-long event where cartoonists drew on the walls of the bar in exchange for food and booze. (The Overlook guys were kind and generous in this respect for sure as cartoonists tend to put away a lot.)
The media was there, TV stations and newspapers. The Times called it "the Sistine Chapel of cartoon art." So many great cartoonists drew on the wall: Bill Gallo (who helped organize the event and was one of the cartoonists featured on the older cartoon wall that was drawn opposite of the then-new wall back in 1976), Don Orehek, Adrian Sinnott, Sam Gross, Irwin Hasen, Sy Barry, Stan Goldberg, Victoria Roberts, Nick Downes, Sam Norkin, Andy Eng, Arnie Roth, Mell Lazarus, Frank Springer, Sal Amendola, Guy Gilchrist, Peter Porges, John Caldwell, Chris Browne, Dan Piraro, John Klossner, Mort Gerberg, Anne Gibbons, Robert Leighton, Nick Meglin, Ted Rall, Bill Kresse, Ted Slampyak, Arnie Levin, Al Jaffee, Rina Piccolo, Sam Viviano, Mort Walker, Bunny Hoest & John Reiner, Taylor Jones, Al Scaduto, Irwin Hasen, Henrik Rehr, Joe Edwards and many more.
Among the attendees was Jules Feiffer, who had come a little late in the afternoon. Regardless, he drew on the wall and helped himself to the buffet and some drinks, which were still flowing. I was exhausted and relieved. I had, along with Gallo, organized the event and it had been a success. I had, also, been maybe doing more drinking than eating and so, was a bit tipsy. Cartoonists were leaving, but a few, like Feiffer, were hanging around. I wound up sitting with him to one side and on the other, the Daily News editorial page editor (and Little Orphan Annie writer) Jay Maeder. I was happy to be silent. I am not sure how it happened, but Jules and Jay began talking like this:
Jay: Cigarette Sadie?
Jules: Dick Tracy. ... What about Barney Google?
Jay: Bunky. ... Colonel Potter and the Duchess?
Jules: Blondie. ... Herby?
Jay: Smitty ... Little Iodine?
Jules: They'll Do It Every Time. ... Spooky?
Jay: Smokey Stover. ... Mr. Jack?
Jules: Little Jimmy.
It took me a minute to figure out what the hell they were doing. This game went on for a while, with each naming a newspaper comic strip and then recalling its secondary additional, or "topper" strip that would run above it in the Sunday paper. The knowledge, since it was absolutely obscure comic strip knowledge, deeply impressed me.
Jules had to leave. He had an appointment and from the sound of it, it wasn't anywhere nearly as interesting as drinking and playing this game at the Overlook Lounge. But, off he went, down 44th Street, in the direction of Grand Central. After a minute, Jay asked me what "that" was next to me. It was a leather bag full of papers, obviously left by Jules. I grabbed it, ran out of the bar and down the street. I could see Jules, way down at the end of the city block, about to cross Third Avenue. I ran and yelled his name. It took until Lexington Avenue, but he heard at last, turned and looked at me, surprised. I held up his bag. He still looked confused. "You left this!" I told him. Finally recognizing me, he smiled and grabbed it and thanked me profusely. I was out of breath and felt sick, but I had averted a potential crisis. Who knows what was in that bag? A new Feiffer graphic novel? Heavens. I wish I knew. Anyway, the good news is that I did not throw up and the running really sobered me up for my trip back home to Brooklyn.
In 2018, the NYC chapter of the NCS had another drawing on the walls event that I was happy to NOT plan, but be a part of. That makes for many cartoon drawings spanning from 1976 to 2005 to 2018. I can't wait for the next one.
Fifty years ago, in 1964, I was an alienated high-school kid – excuse my redundancy – who discovered the Village Voice, and Jules's weekly cartoon strip, and shortly afterward I wasn't so lonely.
I bought whatever paperbacks I could get my hands on: Sick Sick Sick, Passionella, Hold Me!, etc., and discovered the incredible Munro animated film directed by Gene Deitch. And when I started college the following year, I found myself "tricked" into buying a magazine which I thought had a Feiffer cartoon on the cover but which turned out to be a brilliant Bhob Stewart satire. The good news was that this was how I discovered Paul Krassner's Realist, and between Paul and Jules, my lonely teen years were over.
A half-century later senior ailments, rather than adolescent alienations, are disconnecting me. but I never stopped following Jules's work, up to his recent graphic novel trilogy and his latest children's book. He's been an influence in my life throughout all these decades, and will continue to be an inspiration to me as I do my best to carry on.
He made a line dance like no one else.
Given that Jules Feiffer invented alt-weekly comic strips, launched superhero studies, helped define early 1970s cinema, and collaborated on and created some of the slyest children’s books ever published, it’s easy to overlook that in 1969, he also made an important mark as a comics journalist.
Photographs weren’t allowed in Judge Julius Hoffman’s courtroom during the prosecution of 1968 Democratic National Convention protesters Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, Rennie Davis, David Dellinger, John Froines, Tom Hayden, and Lee Weiner (and Bobby Seale until he received a mistrial). But Hoffman didn’t count on images from Feiffer, who personally attended the legal circus that would become known as the Trial of the Chicago Seven. Over a four-month period, Feiffer made numerous visits to the courtroom and created 250 pen-and-ink illustrations of the proceedings, publishing a selection of them in the Grove Press book Pictures at a Prosecution: Drawings and Texts from the Chicago Conspiracy Trial (repackaged in 2006 by historian Jon Wiener as Conspiracy in the Streets).
Feiffer had actually witnessed the violence in the Chicago streets first-hand, as a Eugene McCarthy delegate to the Democratic National Convention. In his memoir Backing Into Forward, he remembered milling about on the streets, where he found the protesters “an amiable, high-spirited mob on its way to getting gassed and assaulted.” He also recalled that he was drinking martinis in the Hilton bar with Studs Terkel and William Styron, all the while looking through the hotel picture window to see police pounding their nightsticks over protesters’ heads — until the entire crowd came crashing through the window.
For his courtroom work, Feiffer drew with a characteristically improvisatory and expressive ink line, accompanying portraits of the major actors with hand-scrawled dialogue, descriptions and titles such as “Marshal closing Judy Collins’ mouth as she tries to sing ‘Where Have All The Flowers Gone.’” Feiffer’s satire cuts most sharply when he shows Hoffman ordering Bobby Seale physically gagged in court: Feiffer turns the comics blackface tradition on its head by showing Hoffman in blackface as the judge mimics Seale’s voice.
Along with Tad Dorgan’s “Battle of the Century” prizefight cartoons, Art Young’s portraits of the Haymarket prisoners and especially Bill Mauldin’s extensive World War II work, Feiffer created some of the twentieth century’s most gripping comics journalism, paving the way for cartoonists like Joe Sacco, Sarah Glidden and Guy Deslisle. Like all worthy journalism, these comics take us to places and times we’d otherwise be unable to visit, and communicate both what happened and what it felt like to be there. Wrote Feiffer in his preface to Pictures at a Prosecution: “If, in reading this, the atmosphere of oppression becomes intolerable, if shouts of racist, fascist, and pig — so shocking when one reads them in the newspapers — here come off as rational, almost temperate comments, you’re on the way to understanding what it was like to be there, and what it’s going to be like at future political trials.”
Jules Feiffer has made my shortlist. Unfortunately, it’s a permanent one, of the comic and cartoon creators I wish I’d met before they died. I’ve been lucky enough to work with some bigwigs, so I thought Feiffer and I would eventually cross paths; I’m not sure I can even count how many one-degree-of-separations I have to him, which makes not ever meeting all the more frustrating. He’s precisely the sort of creator I admire most and aspire to be. Not specifically his style – though the looseness of his artwork held a wild precision I wish, desperately, I could force my perfectionist tendencies to adopt — but what was contained within his art was, well, everything. No matter the subject, Feiffer was able to extract its essential essence and transform it into something funny, sad, infuriating, fascinating or poignant — and frequently managed to mix a delicious, inky cocktail containing every single one of those ingredients.
Walt Kelly. Harvey Kurtzman. Charles Schulz. Hergé. There are others, of course (I don’t keep an actual list), but to make my sad-I-never-metcha lineup a cartoonist really has to have had something “more” than talent or success, and there seemed to be so much more to Feiffer. Comics were the way he (usually) chose to communicate his interests, but I’d be surprised if he wouldn’t have enjoyed a good conversation about just about anything. I’m guessing, of course, which is my whole point. Feiffer is way up my list, and I bet a conversation with him would’ve been just like his comics: an eclectic, electric jumble of wacky, utterly precise insight.
I’ll never be the artist he was, but to a certain extent that’s because no one can. Feiffer was unique. He was exceptional. He was a measure of greatness.
It goes without saying that Jules was an absolute legend. Others will write more eloquently about his mastery of the interplay of words and images and the seeming effortlessness of his gestural linework. All I can say is, those of us who followed in his footsteps in the alternative weeklies owe him an inexpressible debt of gratitude. He was the trailblazer who opened up the path for everyone else.
I was fortunate to get to know him in the ‘90s and ‘00s. I’m not sure when we first met in person — possibly at an event at the Free Library of Philadelphia? Or maybe it was the time he came to San Francisco, where I was living, for a book signing, and he called me from the plane to ask me to put together a dinner afterwards. A few years later, when I was living in New York, he’d invite me over to the apartment on West End Avenue from time to time. I remember a disintegrating original from The Phantom Tollbooth hanging on the wall (the art had been drawn on some impossibly cheap tracing paper). It felt like viewing a sacred relic.
Jules was always generous with his time and advice, and with the many stories from his life, when it came to younger cartoonists. I mostly lost touch with him around 2004, when I left the city due to my then-wife’s new job, though I did see him once more, at SPX in 2014, where we were on a panel about political cartooning together. He was “only” 85 then, and getting pretty frail — he held onto my arm as I helped him down the hall to the auditorium — but he still had another decade’s worth of work in him. Any cartoonist — any *person* — should be so lucky as to live a life like that.
After watching Gore Vidal’s play An Evening with Richard Nixon, Jules Feiffer unexpectedly found himself “feeling sorry for Nixon. ... Just because of the overkill and the setting up of false terms.” Feiffer is a trustworthy guide through the thickets of political art. From 1956 to 1997 in his famous weekly strip in the Village Voice, Feiffer was America’s premier satirical cartoonist, the artist who best captured the tone and timbre of American public rhetoric from the time of Eisenhower to Clinton.
Looking back on Feiffer’s long and distinguished tenure, what is striking is how he was most bitingly accurate when he allowed a measure of empathy into his work. He was able to resist the danger of overkill by balancing political contempt with human sympathy. A skilled writer of plays and movies, Feiffer seems to have picked up by osmosis the actor’s gift of impersonation, the ability to look at the world through the eyes of even the most unsympathetic soul.
Now that we have tapes and memoirs that give us the private conversations of Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon, it is uncanny how often their small talk could have been scripted by Feiffer. In a Vietnam era strip, Feiffer translated Lydon Johnson’s political fate into a melodramatic western. A cute little missy is asking her “Big Daddy” what happened to Great Society, the plans for domestic betterment that were derailed by the Vietnam war. Like a father comforting his daughter after a beloved horse has died, Johnson offers the young girl a soothing oration. “Great Society has gone away, has gone t’sleep, has gone to a better land’n yew an’ I know of child,” the President says.
In 1976 the historian Doris Kearns Goodwin published Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream, based on her extensive interviews with the late president. Like his comic strip counterpart, Goodwin’s L.B.J. saw himself as the hero of a cowboy movie, with his efforts to build a good life for the womenfolk at the homestead destroyed by the need to go out and fight enemies. “I knew from the start if I left a woman I really loved – the Great Society – in order to fight that bitch of a war [in Vietnam] ... then I would lose everything at home,” Johnson told Goodwin. Not even Feiffer’s imagined the president uttering such hokey dialogue.
Feiffer’s strips were as much about psychology as politics. Like his contemporary Charles Schulz, Feiffer brought an awareness of therapeutic culture into the comics. It’s no accident that Feiffer’s art has the jangly looseness of a Rorschach test or a psychiatrist’s notepad. Like a good analyst, Feiffer allowed his characters to free-associate their way to self-discovery. His focus repeatedly returned on the lies people tell themselves, the rhetorical self-deceptions that allow powerful leaders (and their followers) to do bad things. The characteristic Feiffer strip is a monologue where someone comforts themselves in the false security of their own rhetoric but then hit a sharp contradiction at the end.
Feiffer was the gold standard for American political cartooning. It also informed all his other work, his plays, his movies, his fiction, his children’s books, and his essays. The full scale of his achievement has yet to be measured.
This is one of my favorite quotes from Jules Feiffer, who was always a big inspiration: “The artwork had very little to do with the thought process, and the writing too, for that matter. What happens, happens, and it happens outside the brain.”
To me, this is a good reminder to let your subconscious take the reins in the creative process – something he was a master at, along with satire. It’s not always easy, but I try to strive for this in my own work (time will tell!).
Like many people of my generation, I discovered Jules Feiffer from The Phantom Tollbooth. I was a weird kid, a lover of words, and The Phantom Tollbooth just clicked with me. Norton Juster's story and those wonderful Feiffer illustrations are just etched in my brain.
Later when I was a teenager, I stumbled across a crumbling copy of The Great Comic Book Heroes in my school's library. Stories of characters I knew, and some I didn't, long forgotten and out of print. I'd never heard of The Spirit, or even Will Eisner at that point in my life. It didn't take long to correct that.
I got older, moved to New York City, and started reading the Village Voice, primarily for the comics and concert ads. And there was Feiffer, in the last years of his strip. Those words, those lines. By that point he had utterly mastered the form. I wish I had known it wasn't going to last much longer. I'd have appreciated it more.
In the years since, I read so much of his work. Jules Feiffer's America. All the great art in Out of Line. The Kill My Mother trilogy. Carnal Knowledge! The list goes on and on. In every story, regardless of the medium, you can see Feiffer's genius at work. He went straight for the jugular on every character. He was a master at using just a few words or lines to really tell you who this person is, what they want, and why they'll never quite get it.
Feiffer's 2010 autobiography Backing into Forward is a chronicle of a life well lived, but it's also the story of someone who never accepted anything at face value. I don't think Feiffer ever truly accepted his own genius. He did so very, very much, but he never seemed satisfied with any of it.
I met Feiffer a couple of times at SPX, by which I mean, I stood on line to get something signed. I never quite knew what to say to him. I've never been so tongue tied around a creator before. His work, his art, meant so much to me. I don't remember what I said to him, but it wasn't much. I did read my signed copy of The Phantom Tollbooth to my kid as soon as he was old (and weird) enough to get it, passing on that weirdness to another generation. Maybe that's better than anything I could have said.
Jules Feiffer was a sweet, kind and entertaining person.
He was a great model of how one could work across the full spectrum of text-image work: comics, plays, movies, and illustrated books.
He brought comics to a rare level of literary and visual sophistication.
Let me join the chorus of folks celebrating the work of Jules Feiffer. He wrote numerous plays and screenplays, books, comics and pioneering print cartoons. His first screen credit, though, was for his work on a cartoon – a Terrytoon. He was on staff there in the mid-1950s, hired by Gene Deitch to do story on Tom Terrific, to co-create a pilot and design several animated shorts. A few years later, Feiffer gained fame from his alternative comic strip (the first one, I believe) and allowed Deitch to make an animated short from one of his stories. That collaboration, Munro, won the Academy Award for Best Cartoon Short in 1960.
In 1965, Feiffer compiled The Great Comic Book Heroes, a seminal book, preceding the Batman craze, that caused comic fandom to explode. I always thought the selection of Feiffer to write the screenplay for the live action Popeye was the perfect hire. So was Nilsson for the music and the casting of Williams and Duvall. I loved Feiffer's comic strips and most all else he did. Never met him, but attended a few public interviews he did – and he always mentioned, ever so slightly, that he started at Terrytoons. Rest In Peace, sir.
Jules Feiffer was a great inspiration to me. His work was so bright and so funny. A perfect marriage of words and drawings.
That I got to call Jules Feiffer a friend is a surreal honor. The Phantom Tollbooth was my favorite book growing up (the reason there are maps in some of the books I have edited is because of the one he and Norton Juster created). The Great Comic Book Heroes introduced me to super heroes. Carnal Knowledge scared the pre-adolescence out of me. His cartoons in the Village Voice taught me about political hypocrisy and relationships. And he showed the world that you can have a second (fifth?) act in your sixties by writing and illustrating your own children’s books, at eighty-five you can publish your first graphic novel trilogy, and at ninety-five write and illustrate a soon-to-be-published 350-page unique and inspiring memoir — proving that we don’t have to slow down with age or stop pushing ourselves to learn new artistic tricks.
Jules and I met in 1999, when MAD magazine editor Nick Meglin was interviewing him for an update of his book The Art of Humorous Illustration. Nick invited me along for the interview, and after a night of talking and drinking and laughing we shared a cab to the Upper West Side and remained in touch ever since. In 2015, he asked that I be the one to present him with a Lifetime Achievement Award at the Baltimore Comic Con. Introducing him remains one of the honors of my career.
That I got to work with Jules is even more surreal. In Spring 2015, Abrams published Out of Line: The Art of Jules Feiffer by Martha Fay. It’s one thing to work with an estate on a monograph about their relative, but it’s another challenge entirely to work with a living, still-working artist who had lots of opinions about what he liked and didn’t like, but was equally effusive when he was presented with something unexpected. For example, the image under the jacket is a photograph of Jules’s high school portfolio. At first he was confused by the idea of a case image (he had never given much thought to what was under the jacket of any of his books, which were usually just a solid color chosen by an art director). He also wasn’t sure about the image itself, and wondered why I insisted on having it photographed in the first place. But when he saw the mock-up of the design, Jules smiled and said, “It’s like my entire career is bookended by this portfolio I schlepped to and from high school every day. I never would have thought to do that, but it’s genius.” It doesn’t get any better than that.
While working on Out of Line, we were stuck finding just the right images for the book’s cover. We had already decided that we wanted to feature his male and female dancers, but they had to be the right dancers. And they had to interact in some way. So one afternoon Jules came over to my apartment, sat at the kitchen table, and quickly drew a male dancer, then showed it to me. “Here you go,” he said, proudly. Some part of my brain shut off — the part that grew up reading his work — and I said, “It’s great, but it’s not quite right.” Without hesitation Jules drew another. “How about this?” he asked. “I think the arm should extend more.” Jules drew another and another and many others until we both felt he had gotten just the right one. He then repeated the process until the female dancer came together. Jules then worked on the title type. Over and over he wrote the words "Out of Line" on dozens of pieces of Abrams stationary until we had what we needed for my designer to Photoshop them together. But “mission accomplished,” we had a cover and he — we — could not love it more. It didn’t matter that I was thirty-something years his junior. Jules was a professional, and he never made me feel like I was overstepping or that my opinion didn’t matter. I’ve worked with artists on their first book who were way less flexible than Jules was working on what was then his fiftieth. Michael Cavna of the Washington Post wrote, “The life of Jules was like the long arc of an elegant line.” Our Abrams book exemplifies this.
Thank you, Jules, for everything you taught me — on and off the page and around the table.
The post Remembering Jules Feiffer appeared first on The Comics Journal.
Hello, my name is Jack Sparrow. I'm a 50 year old self-employed Pirate from the Caribbean.
No comments:
Post a Comment