The multitalented Jules Feiffer, an author-illustrator, cartoonist, novelist, playwright, satirist, and screenwriter identified for a caustic wit that earned him an Academy Award, a Pulitzer Prize, and a spot within the Comedian Ebook Corridor of Fame, died on January 17, simply 9 days shy of his 96th birthday. The trigger, stated his widow, JZ Holden, was congestive coronary heart failure.

As a baby within the Thirties, Feiffer breathed comics, and from the age of eight till his loss of life, they remained his life’s fixed. Even when his profession cut up into parallel artistic paths, comics had been ever-present—not least in his extensively syndicated weekly Village Voice strip, Feiffer, which he produced with out fail for greater than 40 years. In his 70s and after an early foray within the kind, he turned his abilities and fervour for panels to the realm of kids’s books, earlier than turning, in his 80s, to the graphic novel, a kind pioneered by his late mentor, Will Eisner.

Feiffer proved a singular expertise amongst cartoonists, with pursuits each quite a few and diffuse. His accolades adopted go well with. On the comics facet, he obtained a Pulitzer Prize for Editorial Cartooning in 1986, the Inkpot from Comedian-Con Worldwide in 1989, and a Nationwide Cartoonists Society Milton Caniff Lifetime Achievement Award in 2004; that very same yr, he was inducted into the Comedian Ebook Corridor of Fame. He additionally gained an Oscar in 1968, an Obie Award in 1969, and lifelong achievement awards from the Writers Guild of America in 2010 and the Dramatists Guild of America in 2023.

Feiffer’s best influence on the general public psyche stays his Village Voice cartoons. Each week from 1956 to 1997, Feiffer was given free rein to discover the idiosyncrasies, hypocrisies, and contradictions of American center class life and the society, politics, and tradition of the day. It was an enormous hit, with syndication beginning in 1959 making him well-known throughout America and different elements of the globe.

Grasp and Apprentice

The meteoric rise shocked Feiffer, as for years he had struggled to discover a residence for his cartoons. In interviews, he recalled many encouragingly eager commissioning editors nixed by overcautious higher-ups. To make hire, he took work as a business illustrator for promoting businesses and magazines. He got here to the nascent Voice desperately searching for a house for his work—though, at that time in its historical past, it did not pay contributors. By the point the Voice ended Feiffer, its author-illustrator was being paid $75,000 per yr, and had a number of collections of his cartoons in print.

Feiffer was born within the Bronx, N.Y., on January 26, 1929, into the Nice Melancholy and a growth in newspaper cartoons. He would eagerly learn the strips from his father’s papers and seek out the comics pages from whichever publications weren’t obtainable within the Feiffer family. Amongst his favorites had been 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 tales and dynamism he discovered on the printed web page, at 11, he started to provide his personal comics and promote them on the road—often with the assistance of his little sister, Alice—for seven cents.

By way of faculty, Feiffer harbored the dream of turning into knowledgeable cartoonist. In 1946, at 17, he took an opportunity, gathered his portfolio, and went to the studio of the legendary Will Eisner to ask for a job. Eisner wasn’t eager on Feiffer’s inventive capacity, however his fandom and enthusiasm flattered the auteur sufficient to land Feiffer a job as a gofer, and after a couple of years of artwork lessons, his storytelling particularly impressed Eisner sufficient to let {the teenager} ghostwrite on his signature sequence, The Spirit.

As Feiffer’s artwork improved, he started to jot down his personal strip within the again pages of The Spirit’s weekly newspaper complement, marking his first publication below his personal identify. That strip, Clifford, debuted in 1949, depicting youngsters as themselves quite than as adult-imposed beliefs, and is taken into account a precursor to Charles Schulz’s Peanuts.

The modest success of the strip was reduce brief when Feiffer was drafted the next yr, the place he proved ill-suited to army service. His time in uniform did, nonetheless, crystalize his private politics, resulting in an early artistic breakthrough: Munro, a longform cartoon farce a couple of four-year-old drafted into the U.S. army. Created over the course of his service (1950-1953) and revealed in 1959, the work confirmed the emergence of themes that may turn out to be hallmarks of Feiffer’s weekly cartoon, not least of which was the hypocrisy of authority figures. A Gene Deitch–directed animated adaptation gained the Oscar for Finest Animated Quick Movie in 1961.

​Reinvention

Regardless of his continued success on the Village Voice, Feiffer was creatively stressed, experimenting and fascinating in a number of careers, some extra efficiently than others. Between 1956 and 1997, he wrote two novels, Harry, the Rat with Ladies (McGraw-Hill, 1963) and Ackroyd (Simon and Schuster, 1977); greater than a dozen performs, together with the Obie award-winning Little Murders (1967) and The White Home Homicide Case (1970); and 7 screenplays, together with the Mike Nichols–directed Carnal Data (1971) and Robert Altman’s big-screen adaptation, Popeye (1980).

In 1965, Feiffer produced one of many earliest books about comics, The Nice Comedian Ebook Heroes (Dial Press, 1965), which influenced Maus cartoonist Artwork Spiegelman and editor, author, and former DC Comics president Paul Levitz, amongst others. And in 2010, he revealed his memoir, Backing into Ahead, with Doubleday in 2010, which obtained a starred evaluation in PW.

The abrupt finish of Feiffer within the ‘90s gave Feiffer the excuse to reinvent himself, and he leaned into his work in each youngsters’s books and graphic novels. Feiffer first made a reputation for himself in youngsters’s literature together with his pen-and-ink illustrations for buddy and Brooklyn roommate Norton Juster’s The Phantom Tollbooth—an ideal match for the story’s ample wordplay and basic delight within the absurd. Printed in 1961 by Random Home to fast success, the e-book is taken into account a basic of kids’s fantasy.

Over time, Feiffer sometimes returned to youngsters’s books, together with in 1999 for his image e-book Bark, George (Michael di Capua Books). Since its publication, Bark, George has bought greater than 300,000 hardcover copies and has been translated into seven languages. Feiffer adopted it up twenty years later with a sequel, Good George, marking his twelfth e-book with di Capua. And Feiffer and Juster reunited 50 years after The Phantom Tollbooth for an image e-book, The Odious Ogre, additionally with di Capua. Most not too long ago, Feiffer launched his first graphic novel for kids, Wonderful Grapes, final fall, to nice acclaim.

“Writing for younger readers connects me professionally to part of myself that I didn’t know how one can let loose till I used to be 60,” Feiffer stated in an announcement on the time the e-book was introduced. As a youngsters’s writer, he tapped into “that child who lived a lifetime of innocence, blended with confusion and consternation, disappointment, and dopey humor. And who drew comedian strips and wanted pals—and located them—in cartoons and kids’s books that advised him what the grown-ups in his life had omitted. That’s what studying did for me once I was a child. Now I attempt to return the favor.”

Feiffer first experimented with the graphic novel format in 1979, with Tantrum (Knopf), however his most concerted run as a graphic novelist got here in his 80s, with the acclaimed Kill My Mom trilogy (Liveright, 2014-2018). All three volumes within the sequence—Kill My Mom, Cousin Joseph, and The Ghost Script, obtained starred opinions in PW. “Feiffer,” the third evaluation said, “has an totally distinctive tackle crime fiction and crime comics, drawing with an power that virtually hurls the characters off the web page.”

Trade Appreciations

Feiffer’s fixed artistic movement and prodigious skills persistently impressed his companions within the enterprise—as did his outsize character.

“I cherished working with and understanding Jules. He had sturdy opinions, and voiced them strongly, however he was extremely sort and considerate personally to me. All the time,” his literary agent, Gail Hochman of Brandt & Hochman, advised PW. “He may very well be nearly impish and mischievous. He was grateful after we did good work for him; at different occasions, he may element what could be going sideways, in order that we may work to appropriate it. I cherished having a name with him, as he would start each name with a grand cheerful ‘howdy, sweetheart,’ and we’d catch up for a bit after which get to the matter at hand.”

Hochman was initially Feiffer’s agent on “a couple of of his youngsters’s books,” however sooner or later, she stated, “he gave me a textual content for a graphic novel for adults. ‘Jules, why is that this only a textual content? Do not you need to draw it?’ I requested. ‘No’, he stated, ‘you will get another person to attract it.’ However I knew that if I may discover somebody who cherished the textual content and clamored for Jules to attract it, he can be tempted, which is what occurred. That was the graphic novel trilogy we did for Norton. It opened up for him a complete new means of working.”

Charles Kochman, editor-in-chief of Abrams ComicsArts, which revealed Martha Fay’s 2015 artwork e-book Out of Line: The Artwork of Jules Feiffer, known as his friendship with Feiffer “a surreal honor. The Phantom Tollbooth was my favourite e-book rising up (the explanation there are maps in a few of the books I’ve edited is due to the one he and Norton Juster created). The Nice Comedian Ebook Heroes launched me to superheroes. Carnal Data scared the pre-adolescence out of me. His cartoons within the Village Voice taught me about political hypocrisy and relationships.”

Feiffer, Kochman added, “confirmed the world you could have a second (fifth?) act in your 60s by writing and illustrating your personal youngsters’s books, at 85 you possibly can publish your first graphic novel trilogy, and at 95 write and illustrate a soon-to-be-published 350-page distinctive and galvanizing memoir—proving that we don’t must decelerate with age or cease pushing ourselves to be taught new inventive tips.”

This text has been up to date with additional info.