Feiffer, Jules

Jules Feiffer, (born January 26, 1929, New York, New York, U.S.), American cartoonist and writer who became famous for his Feiffer, a satirical comic strip notable for its emphasis on very literate captions. The verbal elements usually took the form of monologues in which the speaker (sometimes pathetic, sometimes pompous) exposed his own insecurities.

Feiffer was educated at the Art Students League of New York and Pratt Institute in New York City, later assisting several comic-strip artists as he learned his trade. From 1949 to 1951 he drew Clifford, a Sunday cartoon-page feature. During the two years he served in the U.S. Army, he did cartoon animation for the Signal Corps.

In 1956 Feiffer’s work was accepted by The Village Voice, a weekly newspaper published in Manhattan’s Greenwich Village, and his eponymous cartoon was an immediate success. It was syndicated, beginning in 1959, and appeared in The Village Voice until 1997, when Feiffer left the newspaper in a salary dispute. He continued to create Feiffer for other publications until 2000.

Feiffer’s first collection of cartoons, Sick, Sick, Sick (1958), was followed by Passionella, and Other Stories (1959). Passionella contains the character Munro, a four-year-old boy who was drafted into the army by mistake. Munro became the basis of an animated cartoon that received an Academy Award in 1961. Later cartoon collections included Boy, Girl, Boy, Girl (1961); Feiffer’s Album (1963); The Unexpurgated Memoirs of Bernard Mergendeiler (1965); a retrospective, Jules Feiffer’s America: From Eisenhower to Reagan (1982); Marriage Is an Invasion of Privacy (1984); and Feiffer’s Children (1986).

Feiffer also wrote satirical revues, such as The Explainers (1961) and Hold Me! (1962), and a one-act play, Crawling Arnold (1961). His full-length plays—Little Murders (1967), The White House Murder Case (1970), and Grown Ups (1981)—like his cartoons, blend farce and biting social criticism. Other literary efforts included the novels Harry, the Rat with Women (1963) and Ackroyd (1977); The Great Comic Book Heroes (1965), which he edited and annotated; and several screenplays, among them Carnal Knowledge (1971), which was directed by Mike Nichols. In 1986 he received a Pulitzer Prize for editorial cartooning. Feiffer also worked on numerous children’s books. In addition to illustrating the popular The Phantom Tollbooth (1961), written by Norton Juster, he wrote I Lost My Bear (1998), Bark, George (1999), The House Across the Street (2002), and A Room with a Zoo (2005). His memoir, Backing into Forward, was published in 2010.