A short life of the author
Jules Ralph Feiffer (born 26 January 1929 in the Bronx, New York) is an American cartoonist, author, playwright, and screenwriter who was, for over four decades, the sharpest and most psychologically penetrating political cartoonist in the United States — an artist whose work in The Village Voice, on Broadway, and in Hollywood constituted a sustained, brilliant critique of American politics, masculinity, neurosis, and the gap between what Americans profess and how they actually behave.
The Village Voice Strip
Feiffer began drawing his untitled weekly comic strip for The Village Voice in 1956 and continued it for forty-one years, until 1997. The strip was unlike any other cartoon of its era: it featured no recurring characters, no narrative continuity, and no conventional punchlines. Instead, Feiffer drew elongated, angular figures — usually urban professionals, intellectuals, or politicians — who delivered monologues of devastating self-exposure. A man explains why he hits his wife (“I used to just yell at her — but I felt she wasn’t really listening”). A liberal confesses his real motives for supporting civil rights. A president rationalises an escalation.
The strips were collected in numerous volumes — Sick, Sick, Sick (1958), The Explainers (1960), Feiffer’s Marriage Manual (1967) — and syndicated to over a hundred newspapers. They won Feiffer the Pulitzer Prize for Editorial Cartooning in 1986.
Will Eisner and The Spirit
Before his own career took off, Feiffer worked as an assistant to the legendary comic book artist Will Eisner on The Spirit — an experience he documented in The Great Comic Book Heroes (1965), a groundbreaking anthology and memoir that was one of the first works to treat comic books as a serious art form and that helped launch the academic study of comics.
Playwright and Screenwriter
Feiffer wrote several plays, the most important of which is Little Murders (1967), a dark comedy about a New York family besieged by random urban violence. The play was initially a commercial failure on Broadway but was revived successfully Off-Broadway and adapted into a cult film (1971) directed by Alan Arkin.
He wrote the screenplay for Mike Nichols’s Carnal Knowledge (1971), starring Jack Nicholson and Art Garfunkel — a bleak, unflinching chronicle of male sexual attitudes from college to middle age that was both a critical success and a commercial hit. He also wrote the screenplay for Robert Altman’s Popeye (1980).
Children’s Books
In his later career, Feiffer became a successful children’s book author and illustrator. He illustrated Norton Juster’s classic The Phantom Tollbooth (1961) — the drawings are inseparable from the book’s identity — and wrote and illustrated his own children’s books, including The Man in the Ceiling (1993), A Barrel of Laughs, a Vale of Tears (1995), and The Hello, Goodbye Window (2005), which won the Caldecott Medal.
Graphic Novel and Memoir
Tantrum (1979) is an early graphic novel — a book-length comic about a forty-two-year-old man who wills himself back into being a two-year-old — that was ahead of its time in treating the comics form as suitable for adult content. Backing into Forward: A Memoir (2010) is a characteristically witty and honest autobiography.
Legacy
Feiffer’s influence extends across cartooning, theatre, film, and children’s literature. He demonstrated that the comic strip could be a vehicle for serious psychological and political observation, and his work paved the way for the underground comix movement and the graphic novel. His satirical vision — targeting not just political hypocrisy but the deeper neuroses of American masculinity and liberal self-congratulation — remains sharp and relevant.
Collecting Feiffer
Sick, Sick, Sick (1958) and the early Village Voice cartoon collections in first edition are the primary Feiffer collectibles. Original cartoon art is collected by institutions and private collectors. The Great Comic Book Heroes (1965, Dial Press) in first edition with dust jacket is sought by comics historians.