The multitalented Jules Feiffer, an author-illustrator, cartoonist, novelist, playwright, satirist, and screenwriter known for a caustic wit that earned him an Academy Award, a Pulitzer Prize, and a place in the Comic Book Hall of Fame, died on January 17, just nine days shy of his 96th birthday. The cause, said his widow, JZ Holden, was congestive heart failure.
As a child in the 1930s, Feiffer breathed comics, and from the age of eight until his death, they remained his life’s constant. Even when his career split into parallel creative paths, comics were ever-present—not least in his widely syndicated weekly Village Voice strip, Feiffer, which he produced without fail for more than 40 years. In his 70s and after an early foray in the form, he turned his skills and passion for panels to the realm of children’s books, before turning, in his 80s, to the graphic novel, a form pioneered by his late mentor, Will Eisner.
Feiffer proved a unique talent among cartoonists, with interests both numerous and diffuse. His accolades followed suit. On the comics side, he received a Pulitzer Prize for Editorial Cartooning in 1986, the Inkpot from Comic-Con International in 1989, and a National Cartoonists Society Milton Caniff Lifetime Achievement Award in 2004; that same year, he was inducted into the Comic Book Hall of Fame. He also won an Oscar in 1968, an Obie Award in 1969, and lifetime achievement awards from the Writers Guild of America in 2010 and the Dramatists Guild of America in 2023.
Feiffer’s greatest impact on the public psyche remains his Village Voice cartoons. Every week from 1956 to 1997, Feiffer was given free rein to explore the idiosyncrasies, hypocrisies, and contradictions of American middle class life and the society, politics, and culture of the day. It was a massive hit, with syndication starting in 1959 making him famous across America and other parts of the globe.
Master and Apprentice
The meteoric rise shocked Feiffer, as for years he had struggled to find a home for his cartoons. In interviews, he recalled many encouragingly keen commissioning editors nixed by overcautious higher-ups. To make rent, he took work as a commercial illustrator for advertising agencies and magazines. He came to the nascent Voice desperately seeking a home for his work—even though, at that point in its history, it didn't pay contributors. By the time the Voice ended Feiffer, its author-illustrator was being paid $75,000 per year, and had multiple collections of his cartoons in print.
Feiffer was born in the Bronx, N.Y., on January 26, 1929, into the Great Depression and a boom in newspaper cartoons. He would eagerly read the strips from his father’s papers and hunt down the comics pages from whichever publications weren’t available in the Feiffer household. Among his favorites were Milton Caniff’s Terry and the Pirates, Al Capp and Raeburn Van Buren’s Abbie an’ Slats, and E.C. Segar’s Popeye. Excited by the stories and dynamism he found on the printed page, at 11, he began to produce his own comics and sell them on the street—usually with the help of his little sister, Alice—for seven cents.
Through school, Feiffer harbored the dream of becoming a professional cartoonist. In 1946, at 17, he took a chance, gathered his portfolio, and went to the studio of the legendary Will Eisner to ask for a job. Eisner wasn’t keen on Feiffer’s artistic ability, but his fandom and enthusiasm flattered the auteur enough to land Feiffer a job as a gofer, and after a few years of art classes, his storytelling in particular impressed Eisner enough to let the teenager ghostwrite on his signature series, The Spirit.
As Feiffer’s art improved, he began to write his own strip in the back pages of The Spirit’s weekly newspaper supplement, marking his first publication under his own name. That strip, Clifford, debuted in 1949, depicting children as themselves rather than as adult-imposed ideals, and is considered a precursor to Charles Schulz’s Peanuts.
The modest success of the strip was cut short when Feiffer was drafted the following year, where he proved ill-suited to military service. His time in uniform did, however, crystalize his personal politics, leading to an early creative breakthrough: Munro, a longform cartoon farce about a four-year-old drafted into the U.S. military. Created over the course of his service (1950-1953) and published in 1959, the work showed the emergence of themes that would become hallmarks of Feiffer’s weekly cartoon, not least of which was the hypocrisy of authority figures. A Gene Deitch–directed animated adaptation won the Oscar for Best Animated Short Film in 1961.
Reinvention
Despite his continued success at the Village Voice, Feiffer was creatively restless, experimenting and engaging in multiple careers, some more successfully than others. Between 1956 and 1997, he wrote two novels, Harry, the Rat with Women (McGraw-Hill, 1963) and Ackroyd (Simon and Schuster, 1977); more than a dozen plays, including the Obie award-winning Little Murders (1967) and The White House Murder Case (1970); and seven screenplays, including the Mike Nichols–directed Carnal Knowledge (1971) and Robert Altman’s big-screen adaptation, Popeye (1980).
In 1965, Feiffer produced one of the earliest books about comics, The Great Comic Book Heroes (Dial Press, 1965), which influenced Maus cartoonist Art Spiegelman and editor, writer, and former DC Comics president Paul Levitz, among others. And in 2010, he published his memoir, Backing into Forward, with Doubleday in 2010, which received a starred review in PW.
The abrupt end of Feiffer in the ‘90s gave Feiffer the excuse to reinvent himself, and he leaned into his work in both children’s books and graphic novels. Feiffer first made a name for himself in children’s literature with his pen-and-ink illustrations for friend and Brooklyn roommate Norton Juster’s The Phantom Tollbooth—a perfect match for the story’s abundant wordplay and general delight in the absurd. Published in 1961 by Random House to immediate success, the book is considered a classic of children’s fantasy.
Over the years, Feiffer occasionally returned to children’s books, including in 1999 for his picture book Bark, George (Michael di Capua Books). Since its publication, Bark, George has sold more than 300,000 hardcover copies and has been translated into seven languages. Feiffer followed it up two decades later with a sequel, Smart George, marking his 12th book with di Capua. And Feiffer and Juster reunited 50 years after The Phantom Tollbooth for a picture book, The Odious Ogre, also with di Capua. Most recently, Feiffer released his first graphic novel for children, Amazing Grapes, last fall, to great acclaim.
“Writing for young readers connects me professionally to a part of myself that I didn’t know how to let out until I was 60,” Feiffer said in a statement at the time the book was announced. As a children’s author, he tapped into “that kid who lived a life of innocence, mixed with confusion and consternation, disappointment, and dopey humor. And who drew comic strips and needed friends—and found them—in cartoons and children’s books that told him what the grown-ups in his life had left out. That’s what reading did for me when I was a kid. Now I try to return the favor.”
Feiffer first experimented with the graphic novel format in 1979, with Tantrum (Knopf), but his most concerted run as a graphic novelist came in his 80s, with the acclaimed Kill My Mother trilogy (Liveright, 2014-2018). All three volumes in the series—Kill My Mother, Cousin Joseph, and The Ghost Script, received starred reviews in PW. “Feiffer,” the third review stated, “has an utterly unique take on crime fiction and crime comics, drawing with an energy that practically hurls the characters off the page.”
Industry Appreciations
Feiffer’s constant creative motion and prodigious talents consistently impressed his partners in the business—as did his outsize personality.
“I loved working with and knowing Jules. He had strong opinions, and voiced them strongly, but he was incredibly kind and thoughtful personally to me. Always,” his literary agent, Gail Hochman of Brandt & Hochman, told PW. “He could be almost impish and mischievous. He was grateful when we did good work for him; at other times, he could detail what might be going sideways, so that we could work to correct it. I loved having a call with him, as he would begin every call with a grand cheerful ‘hello, sweetheart,’ and we would catch up for a bit and then get to the matter at hand.”
Hochman was initially Feiffer’s agent on “a few of his children's books,” but one day, she said, “he gave me a text for a graphic novel for adults. ‘Jules, why is this just a text? Don't you want to draw it?’ I asked. ‘No’, he said, ‘you can get someone else to draw it.’ But I knew that if I could find someone who loved the text and clamored for Jules to draw it, he would be tempted, which is what happened. That was the graphic novel trilogy we did for Norton. It opened up for him a whole new way of working.”
Charles Kochman, editor-in-chief of Abrams ComicsArts, which published Martha Fay’s 2015 art book Out of Line: The Art of Jules Feiffer, called his friendship with Feiffer “a surreal honor. The Phantom Tollbooth was my favorite book growing up (the reason there are maps in some of the books I’ve edited is because of the one he and Norton Juster created). The Great Comic Book Heroes introduced me to superheroes. Carnal Knowledge scared the pre-adolescence out of me. His cartoons in the Village Voice taught me about political hypocrisy and relationships.”
Feiffer, Kochman added, “showed the world that you can have a second (fifth?) act in your 60s by writing and illustrating your own children’s books, at 85 you can publish your first graphic novel trilogy, and at 95 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.”
This article has been updated with further information.