Jules Feiffer was perhaps the last emissary from what might be called the Heroic Age of the Cartoonist.
Feiffer, who died on Jan. 17 at age 95, parlayed his day job as the creator of a weekly newspaper comic strip into a position of extraordinary cultural prominence. For the midcentury intelligentsia, Feiffer, who drew his signature strip in various incarnations from 1956 through 1997, was a name to be dropped in hip company in the same manner as Norman Mailer or Lenny Bruce. To peruse the latest Feiffer strip was to receive affirmation of one’s views of Presidents Lyndon Johnson and Ronald Reagan, the Cold War, the Vietnam War, and the battle of the sexes — in his panels, the radical left saw itself reflected back in pen and ink.
But to refer to Feiffer merely as a cartoonist does a disservice to the depth and diversity of his talent and the reach of his influence. Feiffer churned out plays (The White House Murder Case), film scripts (Popeye), novels (Ackroyd), children’s books (Bark, George), and what would today be pretentiously referred to as “graphic novels” (Tantrum). Some of these ventures depended on his skills as an artist, but others merely relied on his authentic wit and perceived insight into all the important matters of our times. Never again will a satirical cartoonist be as prolific or widely known — what’s the best a left-leaning newspaper cartoonist can hope for in 2025, a lousy Pulitzer Prize? Feiffer won one of those, too — in 1986 for editorial cartooning.
To his credit, Feiffer always sounded somewhat awed that he managed to ply his trade for his entire working life, and for some years before he ever earned a paycheck. Born in the Bronx in 1929, Feiffer discovered comics through the same means as most children of his generation: the funny papers. When I interviewed Feiffer for a profile in the Christian Science Monitor in 2020, when he was 91, he remembered those years with a fondness that felt entirely unforced. “My earliest ambition, my earliest dreams, and my earliest joy was in looking at, particularly, the Sunday supplements — the color supplements,” Feiffer told me. “It was pure and beautiful and innocent in a time when innocence was allowed.”
After learning at the feet of legendary Spirit cartoonist Will Eisner, and attempting his own slick strip aimed at a young readership, Clifford, Feiffer blossomed in the margins of the Village Voice. There, he commenced the 41-year run of the strip then known as Sick, Sick, Sick and later called, simply, Feiffer. If the cartoonist’s targets were decidedly unoriginal, essentially any right-of-center politician in America at any given time as well as conventional manners more generally, his drawing style was anything but. Sloughing off the influence of the more polished Eisner, Feiffer honed a style notable for its sketched-in scrappiness — a Feiffer cartoon never looked labored over or coldly perfected, but briskly transmitted to the page. In time, the dashed-off, incomplete quality of his panels would disguise their maker’s advancing age — his cartoons always looked timorous.
With the popularity of the Village Voice strip came opportunities in other mediums, and Feiffer was sufficiently intelligent and industrious to exploit them to their fullest. As early as 1963, Feiffer produced a novel (Harry, The Rat with Women), and by the end of the decade, he was arguably as applauded for his stage work as his cartoons. Feiffer’s best plays included 1967’s Little Murders, which told, in terms both comic and despairing, of a New York City family that finds itself increasingly despondent over and hemmed in by bursts of violent madness in the city surrounding them. In 1971, Alan Arkin directed and Elliott Gould starred in a memorably morose film version of Little Murders. With his screenplay for Mike Nichols’s Carnal Knowledge, also from 1971, Feiffer broke even further with liberal consensus: This classic film starred Jack Nicholson and Art Garfunkel as men rendered spiritually ruined by the so-called sexual revolution. He was forever a liberal, but he was clear-eyed about human nature, especially in his dramas.
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Feiffer maintained his multitrack career for decades. There were more plays, including the superbly unsentimental family drama Grown Ups (1981); more screenplays, among them a fanciful self-portrait of a neglected cartoonist, I Want to Go Home (1989); and a gaggle of books for young readers, including The Man in the Ceiling (1993), A Bale of Laughs, a Vale of Tears (1995), and Meanwhile (1997). He remained loyal to cartooning pioneers, including E.C. Segar, whose strip Thimble Theater he adapted into a popular and still-impressive 1980 Robert Altman film starring Robin Williams: Popeye. Although his arrangement with the Village Voice strip came to an end in 1997, he continued to contribute cartoons on a freelance basis to all manner of publications, from the New York Times to the Nation.
When I interviewed him in 2020, Feiffer was in the midst of promoting his latest children’s book, a sequel to an earlier tome titled Smart George. He gave no indications of winding down, and he never did. “When I sit down at my drawing table,” he told me back then, “I can do anything that I’ve ever done, it turns out.”
Peter Tonguette is a contributing writer to the Washington Examiner magazine.