Remembering the Fluid Lines and Savage Wit of Cartoonist Jules Feiffer

Posted on January 22, 2025

by Eric P

Maybe you first encountered Jules Feiffer as a child, reading his Bark, George, which happens to be one of the greatest picture books of all time. Or maybe you were a little older and first saw his indelibly squirrely illustrations for Norton Juster’s novel The Phantom Tollbooth. Or maybe your first exposure was via one of the movies he scripted like the caustic Carnal Knowledge or the bustling Popeye. Maybe you were a Broadway theatregoer in the 1960s and you caught one of his plays like Little Murders. Or maybe you were a neurotic hipster in Greenwich Village sometime between 1956 and 1997, in which case you definitely saw his award-winning satirical comic strip Feiffer in the Village Voice. Or maybe you ran across all these works over the years, plus maybe one or two of his novels, in which case you’d be forgiven for assuming that they were all created by completely different individuals. I mean: movies, plays, comics, kids’ books – who does all that? Pick a lane, Feiffer!

It was probably with cartooning that Feiffer, who died Friday, Jan. 17, was most closely identified, and most powerfully influential. His satirical Voice comics, packed with words and saturated with urbane angst, didn’t look like other strips. The individual panels weren’t sequestered from one another inside bordered boxes but rather coexisted with one another across an undifferentiated plain. If most sequential art depicts a staccato series of consecutive but separate vignettes, Feiffer’s flowed seamlessly from one moment into the next, creating a breathless accelerating effect that was an apt fit for his characters’ racing stream-of-consciousness verbosity and cascading anxieties.

The characters themselves tended to be wispy things — big eyes atop slender bodies that either danced nimbly across the page or stood immutably planted under the weight of their own existential dread. In this idiosyncratic format, and without the help of serialized storytelling or (for the most part) regularly recurring characters, Feiffer commented on war, sex, the federal budget, the AIDS crisis, psychoanalysis, philosophy, parenting, and narcissism for 42 years, spawning scores of squiggly imitators and earning a Pulitzer for his genius along the way.

Feiffer was remarkable not just for his talent, his eclecticism, and his prolificity but for his endurance. His most recent kids’ book, Amazing Grapes, came out just a few months ago; he was 95 years old, his vision was compromised by macular degeneration, and he was, he said, doing the best work he’d ever done.

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