Jules Feiffer

Jules Ralph Feiffer (/ˈfaɪfər/ FY-fər; 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. He won the Pulitzer Prize in 1986 for editorial cartooning and, in 2004, Feiffer was inducted into the Comic Book Hall of Fame. He wrote the animated short Munro, which won an Academy Award for Best Animated Short Film in 1961. The Library of Congress has recognized Feiffer's "remarkable legacy", from 1946 to the present, as a cartoonist, playwright, screenwriter, adult and children's book author, illustrator, and art instructor.

When Feiffer was 17 (in the mid-1940s), he became assistant to cartoonist Will Eisner. There, he helped Eisner write and illustrate his comic strips, including The Spirit. In 1956, Feiffer became a staff cartoonist at The Village Voice, where he produced the weekly comic strip titled Feiffer until 1997. Feiffer's cartoons became nationally syndicated in 1959 and then appeared regularly in publications including the Los Angeles Times, the London Observer, The New Yorker, Playboy, Esquire, and The Nation. In 1997, he created the first op-ed page comic strip for The 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, Feiffer wrote The 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, he created his first graphic novel, Tantrum. By 1993, Feiffer 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 including Little Murders (1967), Feiffer's People (1969), and Knock Knock (1976). He wrote the screenplay for Carnal Knowledge (1971), directed by Mike Nichols, and Popeye (1980), directed by Robert Altman. At the time of his death, Feiffer was working on a visual memoir.

Feiffer was born in The Bronx, New York City, on January 26, 1929. His parents were David Feiffer and Rhoda (née Davis), and Feiffer was raised in a Jewish household with a younger and an older sister. David was usually unemployed in his work as a salesman due to the Depression, while Rhoda 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. However, the fact that she was the breadwinner created an "atmosphere of silent blame" in the home. Feiffer began drawing at age three. "My mother always encouraged me to draw," he said.

When Feiffer was 13, his mother gave him a drawing table for his bedroom. She also enrolled Feiffer in the Art Students League of New York to study anatomy. He graduated from James Monroe High School in 1947. Feiffer won a John Wanamaker Art Contest medal for a crayon drawing of the radio Western hero Tom Mix. 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; the Crimson Avenger from The Green Hornet ...

Feiffer said that cartoons were his first interest when young, "what I loved the most." Feiffer stated that because he could not 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. Feiffer read comic strips from various newspapers which his father brought home, and he was attracted mostly 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."