Jules Feiffer, an artist whose creative instincts and political passions could not be confined to one medium, died on Friday at his home in Richfield Springs, N.Y., west of Albany. He was 95.
His wife, JZ Holden, said the cause was congestive heart failure.
Mr. Feiffer was primarily known as a cartoonist. His syndicated black-and-white comic strip, “Feiffer,” which astringently articulated the cynical, neurotic, aggrieved and ardently left-wing sensibilities of postwar Greenwich Village, began in The Village Voice in 1956 and ran for more than 40 years. But his career also encompassed novels, plays, screenplays, animation and children’s books.
A recurrent element in much of his work was his acerbic view of human nature.
As a screenwriter, Mr. Feiffer collaborated with the French filmmaker Alain Resnais (on the 1989 film “I Want to Go Home”) and the American directors Robert Altman (“Popeye”) and Mike Nichols (“Carnal Knowledge”). As a creator of children’s books, he helped create an acknowledged classic, “The Phantom Tollbooth” (for which his illustrations accompanied Norton Juster’s words). His art appeared in magazines and in gallery and museum exhibitions, and even inspired a modern-dance piece.
Jules Ralph Feiffer was born on Jan. 26, 1929, in the Bronx, to David Feiffer, an unsuccessful men’s shop entrepreneur, and Rhoda (Davis) Feiffer, who sold dress designs and largely supported their family, which also included Jules’s two sisters, Mimi and Alice.
As a child in the 1930s, Jules loved radio dramas and newspaper comic strips. In his 2010 memoir, “Backing Into Forward,” he cited as influences the cartoonists E.C. Segar (“Thimble Theater,” the strip that introduced Popeye), Al Capp (“Li’l Abner”) and Milton Caniff (“Terry and the Pirates”), among others. He embraced the early comic books, which were comic-strip anthologies, and, after Superman’s debut in 1938, superhero comics as well.
At 16, having drawn for high school publications, he talked his way into the studio of his idol, Will Eisner, creator of the Sunday newspaper comic-book insert that featured the Spirit, a masked, non-superpowered sleuth. Mr. Feiffer flattered Mr. Eisner with his knowledge of his work and was hired as a gofer for the studio’s stable of artists. He was eventually entrusted with drawing panel rules and word balloons, filling in shadows and whiting out inkers’ mistakes. He later wrote dialogue and, eventually, entire Spirit stories. In 1947, Mr. Eisner gave him a humor strip at the rear of the section, “Clifford,” which ran until around 1950.
In 1951, Mr. Feiffer was drafted into the Army. It was there, he once recalled, that he developed the anger and distrust for authority that would long characterize his work.
In October 1956, Mr. Feiffer strolled into the office of The Village Voice, which had been founded the previous year, and offered to draw a regular strip for nothing. First titled “Sick, Sick, Sick,” it eventually became “Feiffer.” (He was not paid, he later wrote, until 1964.)
With his signature sketchy, scribbly lines, Mr. Feiffer sought to bring to a six- or nine-panel format a level of visual simplicity and intellectual sophistication akin to what William Steig and Saul Steinberg had done with their cartoons in The New Yorker. Often devoid of backgrounds and panel borders, Mr. Feiffer’s strip focused almost exclusively on dialogue, gestures and facial expressions.
He initially focused the strip on interpersonal relationships. He would present a couple bickering with each other in profile, or someone in therapy, often with the speaker facing the reader.
His political views soon surfaced as well. A frequent target, which he upbraided mercilessly, was complacent, self-satisfied white liberals.
A Pulitzer Winner
“Feiffer” was syndicated in 1959 and ran until 2000, reaching 100 newspapers at its peak. (He left The Village Voice in 1997 but continued to draw the strip monthly for The New York Times.) In 1986, Mr. Feiffer won a Pulitzer Prize for his cartoons.
Two recurring characters in “Feiffer” were his New York Everyman, Bernard Mergendeiler, and the otherwise unnamed Dancer. Bernard, he wrote in the 1982 anthology “Jules Feiffer’s America: From Eisenhower to Reagan,” “was my victim-hero and not hard to come by: I composed him out of my own life and the lives of friends.” He was, he added, “a young urban liberal given to anxiety attacks, stomachaches and obsessive confessionals.”
The leotard-clad Dancer, who first appeared in 1957, was inspired by a girlfriend. She was “Bernard’s female counterpart,” Mr. Feiffer wrote, “abused and exploited by men no less than he was by women, but where Bernard grew defensive and angry over the years, the Dancer retained her faith. She danced, fell, got to her feet, tripped, sailed aloft, came crashing to earth, rose stubbornly and kept dancing.”
In 2011, the filmmaker Judy Dennis immortalized her in “The Dancer Films: Nine Minutes,” a series of one-minute live-action segments with music by Jane Ira Bloom and choreography by Susan Marshall and Larry Keigwin.
“It’s hard to overstate how transformative to cartooning Jules’s early work was,” Garry Trudeau, creator of the comic strip “Doonesbury,” wrote in an email. “By stripping down the art to a sequence of elegant, repetitive images, he found a way to convey astonishingly sophisticated ideas without distraction. No balloons, no screens, no backgrounds, no panels, just simple line drawings and the flow of bright, witty dialogue.”
“Like ‘Peanuts,’” Mr. Trudeau added, “‘Feiffer’ reflected his generation’s obsession with psychology and the examined life. In ‘Feiffer’s world, the mind was a war zone, and the protagonist was usually his own worst enemy. And no subject was off the table — not politics, sex, religion or war. I’d never seen anything remotely like it, and it set me and many others on a path toward a new kind of comics.”
“Feiffer” was anthologized many times. “Sick, Sick, Sick: A Guide to Non-Confident Living” was a best seller in 1958. Other collections of his work included “Passionella and Other Stories” (1959), “The Explainers” (1960, reprinted in 2008) and “Hold Me!” (1962).
Before long, Mr. Feiffer’s sophisticated humor drew the attention of glossy magazines and other mainstream publications. Hugh Hefner had him on Playboy’s payroll for a time, starting in 1958, and Mr. Feiffer’s work also appeared in The New Yorker, The American Prospect and Rolling Stone, among other publications. Exhibitions of his work included “Jules Rulz,” a retrospective at the New-York Historical Society in 2003, and “If You Really Loved Me, You’d Find Me: The Strips 1960-2000,” at the Adam Baumgold Gallery in Manhattan in 2006.
But the restless Mr. Feiffer diversified almost as soon as his cartooning career took off. His story “Munro” — 45 drawings composing a narrative, eventually included in “Passionella and Other Stories” — was adapted into an animated short by Gene Deitch, with whom Mr. Feiffer worked briefly as an animator at the CBS Terrytoons studio in the late 1950s. The story of a 4-year-old drafted into the Army, it won an Oscar in 1961.
It was Mr. Feiffer’s first taste of Hollywood, but it would not be his last.
In the mid-1950s, Norton Juster, a neighbor of Mr. Feiffer’s in Brooklyn, invited him to illustrate a children’s book he was writing, “The Phantom Tollbooth.” An ingenious kaleidoscope of wordplay arguably akin in style to Lewis Carroll, the book, published in 1961, was an instant hit.
It was adapted into an animated feature in 1970; “The Phantom Tollbooth: Beyond Expectations,” a documentary about the book’s creation and influence, had its premiere at the New Yorker Festival in 2013.
Mr. Feiffer tried his hand at novels with “Harry, the Rat With Women” (1963), a moderate success, and “Ackroyd” (1977). He also wrote and edited “The Great Comic Book Heroes” (1965), which reprinted the adventures of characters he loved as a youngster and included his alternately wry and reverent commentary.
On to Broadway
The theater offered another creative outlet. His Broadway plays, some ruefully semi-autobiographical, included the black comedy “Little Murders” (1967); a segment of “Oh! Calcutta!” (1969); “Knock Knock” (1976), for which he received a Tony nomination for best play; and “Grown Ups” (1981). Among his many Off Broadway productions was a new staging of “Little Murders,” which ran for 400 performances two years after its brief and critically panned Broadway run, and for which he won an Obie Award.
His first screenplay was “Carnal Knowledge” (1971), a lacerating examination of two friends and their relationships with women, directed by Mike Nichols and starring Jack Nicholson and Art Garfunkel (in a role Mr. Feiffer later said was modeled after Bernard Mergendeiler). A movie version of “Little Murders,” for which he wrote the screenplay, was also released that year, starring Elliott Gould, who had starred in the Broadway version, and directed by Alan Arkin, who had directed the Off Broadway version.
Around 1980, the movie producer Robert Evans recruited Mr. Feiffer to write the screenplay for Robert Altman’s “Popeye.” Mr. Feiffer patterned his script after the Segar newspaper strip, not the animated adaptations made by the Fleischer brothers in the 1930s and ’40s. When E.C. Segar’s daughter saw the movie, Mr. Feiffer told The Comics Journal in 1988, she called to tell him he had captured the essence of her father’s creation — at which, Mr. Feiffer added, he cried. Though it met a mixed critical reaction, the film, starring Robin Williams as Popeye and Shelley Duvall as Olive Oyl, was a hit.
On the set of “Popeye,” Mr. Feiffer met his second wife, Jenny Allen, who was then a reporter for Life magazine and went on to become a playwright, humorist and monologuist. They divorced in 2014. (His first marriage, to Judy Sheftel, a book editor, had also ended in divorce.) Mr. Feiffer married Ms. Holden, a freelance writer, in 2016.
In addition to his wife, he is survived by his daughters, Kate Feiffer, a children’s book author who collaborated with him; Halley Feiffer, a playwright and actress; Julie Feiffer, a landscaper and shopkeeper in Martha’s Vineyard, Mass.; and two granddaughters.
In May 1997, Mr. Feiffer ended his affiliation with The Village Voice over a salary dispute. “It’s not that I’ve slipped,” he said at the time. “It’s that I’m too expensive.” (In April 2008, he returned for a one-shot, full-page take on Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign.)
Later in life he derived great pleasure from writing and drawing children’s books, some in collaboration with his daughter Kate, among them “The Man in the Ceiling” (1993), “Bark, George” (1999), “By the Side of the Road” (2002), “The Daddy Mountain” (2004) and “A Room With a Zoo” (2005). A 2010 reunion project with Mr. Juster, “The Odious Ogre,” was warmly reviewed.
In 2014 the indefatigable Mr. Feiffer returned to adult themes and the graphic novel format for “Kill My Mother,” a monochromatic tribute to film noir and hard-boiled detective fiction. “His kinetic line drawings unspool like an obscure film found during late-night channel surfing,” Laura Lippman wrote in The New York Times Book Review. “The story,” she added, “is a thoughtful meditation on female identity and whether the not-so-simple art of murder can ever be defended as a moral necessity.”
Two additional installments in a “Kill My Mother” trilogy — rendered in a similar style, and also distantly echoing his influences Will Eisner and Milton Caniff — followed: “Cousin Joseph,” in 2016, and “The Ghost Script,” in 2018. (The copyrights for all three belong to the “B. Mergendeiler Corp.”)
In 2023, Mr. Feiffer collaborated with the author Roger Rosenblatt on “Cataract Blues: Running the Keyboard,” a collection of short pieces about, Mr. Rosenblatt said, “the seen and the unseen and the imagined,” which he was inspired to write after being diagnosed with cataracts. Mr. Feiffer’s choice as illustrator was fitting, Mr. Rosenblatt wrote in a Times opinion essay, because Mr. Feiffer, although still able to draw, was having vision problems of his own: He was suffering from macular degeneration.
In a 2024 interview with Scott Simon on the NPR program “Weekend Edition Saturday,” Mr. Feiffer cited loss of hearing and “a couple of heart attacks” as other manifestations of his advancing years.
But theater and movies beckoned almost to the end. In January 2018, “Bernard and Huey,” an independent film written by Mr. Feiffer and directed by Dan Mirvish, closed the Slamdance Film Festival in Park City, Utah. Like “Carnal Knowledge,” it offers a reunion between two old friends — one of them, of course, Bernard.
When Mr. Feiffer was interviewed by Scott Simon in 2024, the occasion was the publication of “Amazing Grapes,” his first graphic novel for middle-school-age children.
“Are you on to the next project already?” Mr. Simon asked the indefatigable Mr. Feiffer, who had turned 95 that year. “Of course,” he replied. “What a foolish question. Of course.”
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