On 24th January, the world bid farewell to the American Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist and writer, Jules Feiffer. Feiffer’s wife, writer JZ Holden, said that he died of congestive heart failure at his residence in Richfield Springs, New York. Feiffer was surrounded by his friends, two cats, and his recent artwork while breathing his last breath.
According to his wife, Holden, the cartoonist has been ill for a couple of years. “But he was sharp and strong up until the very end. And funny.”, adds Holden.
The cartoonist who portrayed angry New Yorkers died at the age of 95 after publishing his last book just four months ago. From long-running comic strips to screenplays and children’s books, Feiffer was true to his tireless yet nuanced art form throughout his life. He juggled various forms of expression that could chronicle the curiosity of a child, internally developing angst in urban life and other sociopolitical currents.
Feiffer’s Early Life in New York
Jules was born in the eventful town of Bronx, New York. He was determined to take up cartoon making as a serious profession from a very early age. By the time Feiffer turned 16, he started professionally working as a cartoonist by doing storylines and layouts for a syndicated comic supplement, run by Will Eisner. Avenues were slowly growing for him as a cartoonist until in 1951, Feiffer was drafted into the army.
After two years, the cartoonist emerged with a healthy dislike for those in ‘abusive authority’. He went on to publish Munro, a cartoon strip about a child who was more socially aware than just being cute. The cartoon was made into an animated short film, which won the Oscars in 1961. The same year, Norton Juster’s The Phantom Tollbooth containing Feiffer’s illustrations sold more than 5 million copies.
Cartoon Scripts, Play and More
By 1997, Feiffer’s cartoon strips started to widely appear in hundreds of newspapers across the US as well as internationally. His cartoons were crisp and clear in raising voice against hypocrisy and double standards of the government.
Because of is continuous sociopolitical commentary through well-articulated cartoons, his editorial work won the honoured Pulitzer Prize in 1986.
A typical character in Feiffer’s cartoon is an anguished liberal New Yorker who is under endless thought. From the very beginning, he explained that his strips were a portrayal of Greenwich village denizens “explaining themselves with an endless trial of self-interest, self-loathing, self-searching and evasion”. It would not be wrong to state that many of his political caricatures indirectly depicted the 37th US president, Richard Nixon: paranoid, self-unaware and crooked.
What was also important for Feiffer was to have a clear storyline, based on which clever drawings and figures could be added. The storylines would often be only a monologue, working up inside the minds of his characters just like a real person. Because of his storytelling method in cartoons, Feiffer could slowly branch into writing plays such as Little Murders (1967), Knock Knock (1976) and Grown Up (1981).
At the start of the 21st century, Feiffer decided to concentrate more on his writings and went on to write a couple of graphic novels like Tantrum (1977) and the children’s book Bark, George (1999). Alongside, he continued to be a freestanding cartoonist for Rolling Stone, the New Yorker and the New York Times.
His autobiography Backing Into Forward: A Memoir was published in 2010 and shed light on details about his journey from a cartoonist to a writer. Other than being a cartoonist, Feiffer taught at Columbia, Yale and Stony Brook Southampton. His personal life also saw many upheavals. His first two marriages ended in divorce. In 2016, the cartoons decided to marry writer JZ Holden.
