Jules Feiffer

Jules Feiffer
Jules Feiffer in 1958 with proof sheets from his first book, Sick Sick Sick (McGraw-Hill, 1958).
Born	January 26, 1929(1929-01-26)[1] Bronx, New York City, US
Nationality	American
Area(s)	Cartoonist, author, playwright, screenwriter
Notable works	Popeye
Awards	Academy Award, 1961 Pulitzer Prize for editorial cartooning, 1986 Comic Book Hall of Fame, 2004 National Cartoonist Society Milton Caniff Lifetime Achievement Award, 2004
Official website

Jules Feiffer's Feiffer (1959), reprinted in Explainers (2008).

Jules Ralph Feiffer (b. January 26, 1929)^[1] is an American syndicated cartoonist, most notable for his long-run comic strip titled Feiffer.^[2][3] He is the author of numerous plays, screenplays and children's books. In 1986 he won the Pulitzer Prize for his editorial cartooning in The Village Voice.

At age 16, Feiffer began as an assistant for Will Eisner, and within a year he was scripting Eisner's The Spirit comic strip. In 1947, when he asked for a raise, Eisner instead gave him his own page in The Spirit section, where the 18-year-old Feiffer wrote and drew his first comic strip, Clifford (1949-51), which ran in six newspapers.

Feiffer's strips ran for 42 years in the The Village Voice, first under the title Sick Sick Sick, briefly as Feiffer's Fables and finally as simply Feiffer. Influenced by UPA and William Steig, the strip debuted October 24, 1956, and 14 months later, Feiffer had a bestseller when McGraw-Hill collected the Village Voice strips as Sick Sick Sick: A Guide to Non-Confident Living (published January 1, 1958). Beginning April 1959, Feiffer was distributed nationally by the Hall Syndicate, initially in The Boston Globe, Minneapolis Star Tribune, Newark Star-Ledger and Long Island Press.^[4][5]

His strips, cartoons and illustrations have also appeared in The Los Angeles Times, The New Yorker, Esquire, Playboy and The Nation. He was commissioned in 1997 by The New York Times to create its first op-ed page comic strip which ran monthly until 2000.

Books

Following Sick, Sick, Sick: A Guide to Non-Confident Living, Feiffer published More Sick, Sick, Sick and other strip collections, including The Explainers, Boy Girl, Boy Girl, Hold Me!, Feiffer's Album, The Unexpurgated Memoirs of Bernard Mergendeiler, Feiffer on Nixon, Jules Feiffer's America: From Eisenhower to Reagan, Marriage Is an Invasion of Privacy and Feiffer's Children. Passionella (1957) is a graphic narrative initially anthologized in Passionella and Other Stories, a variation on the story of Cinderella. The protagonist is Ella, a chimney sweep who is transformed into a Hollywood movie star. Passionella was used in a musical, The Apple Tree.

His cartoons, strips and illustrations have been reprinted by Fantagraphics as Feiffer: The Collected Works. Explainers (2008) reprints all of his strips from 1956 to 1966.^[4] David Kamp reviewed the book in The New York Times:

His strip, usually six to eight borderless panels, initially appeared under the title “Sick Sick Sick,” with the subtitle “A Guide to Non-Confident Living.” As the Lenny Bruce-ish language suggests, the earliest strips are very much of their time, the postwar Age of Anxiety in the big city; you can practically smell the espresso, the unfiltered ciggies, the lanolin whiff of woolly jumpers. In Feiffer’s sixth-ever strip, an advertising executive is rallying his creative team to make nuclear fallout sexy, proposing “a TV spec called ‘I Fell for Fallout’ ” and “a ‘Mr. and Mrs. Mutation’ contest—designed to change the concept of beauty in the American mind.” The week after that, a macho poet type confides his most shameful secret to his coffeehouse girlfriend: “I’ve never been to Europe.” And the week after that, Feif fer literally puts Oedipus on a psycho analyst’s couch: a hipster in a toga and Ray Charles shades, confessing: “All right... So I marry her. But did I know she was my mother? It’s not like I was sick or something.” The material may show some age, but from the get-go Feiffer’s visual style was assured and bracingly modern: his figures eloquently but sparely drawn (with a thin wooden dowel dipped in ink, not a pen), and no background illustration, just white space. While the strip continued to plumb topical themes as it progressed—Lyndon Johnson, Barry Goldwater and William F. Buckley Jr. all make appearances in “Explainers”—Feiffer became a nimbler satirist, hitting upon several recurring setups and characters that would transcend their atomic-age origins.^[6]

Feiffer has written two novels (Harry the Rat with Women, Ackroyd) and several award-winning children's books, including Henry, The Dog with No Tail, A Room with a Zoo, The Daddy Mountain and A Barrel of Laughs, a Vale of Tears. He partnered with Disney and musical-theater writer Andrew Lippa to adapt his book The Man in the Ceiling into a musical.

His autobiography, Backing into Forward: A Memoir is scheduled for publication in 2010 by Doubleday.

Jules Feiffer's comment on the 2008 election was published in The Village Voice on August 12, 2008.

Theater and films

Feiffer also wrote the stage play Little Murders, the screenplay for Mike Nichols's film Carnal Knowledge (1971), illustrated the children's book classic The Phantom Tollbooth, wrote the book The Great Comic Book Heroes (an extract of which Quentin Tarantino adapted for a speech in his film Kill Bill), and won an Oscar in 1961 for his short animation "Munro". In addition, Feiffer wrote the screenplay for Robert Altman's Popeye film, a movie version of Little Murders and the screenplay for Alain Resnais's film I Want to Go Home.

Teaching

Feiffer is an adjunct professor at Stony Brook Southampton. Previously he taught at the Yale School of Drama and Northwestern University. He has been a Senior Fellow at the Columbia University National Arts Journalism Program. He was in residence at the Arizona State University Barrett Honors College from November 27 to December 2, 2006. In June-August 2009, Feiffer was in residence as a Montgomery Fellow at Dartmouth College, where he taught an undergraduate course on graphic humor in the 20th Century.

Awards

In 1961, he was the recipient of a special George Polk Memorial Award. The Pulitzer Prize for political cartoons went to Feiffer in 1986. He was elected in 1995 to the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In 2004, he was inducted into the Comic Book Hall of Fame and that same year he received the National Cartoonists Society's Milton Caniff Lifetime Achievement Award.^[7] He received the Creativity Foundation's Laureate in 2006.^[8]

Archives

His artwork is exhibited at and represented by Chicago's Jean Albano Gallery. In 1996, Feiffer donated his papers and several hundred original cartoon drawings and book illustrations to the Library of Congress.

References

External links

• AV Club: Jules Feiffer interview
• Book and Writer: Jules Feiffer
• Gallery of Feiffer's work
• Jules Feiffer official site
• Jules Feiffer at the Internet Movie Database