| Jules Feiffer | |
|---|---|
 Jules Feiffer in 1958 with proof sheets from his first book, Sick Sick Sick (McGraw-Hill, 1958). |
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| Born | January 26, 1929[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 Ralph Feiffer (b. January 26, 1929)[1] is an American syndicated cartoonist, most notable for his long-run comic strip titled Feiffer.[2] He has created more than 35 books, plays and screenplays. In 1986 he won the Pulitzer Prize for his editorial cartooning in The Village Voice.
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At age 16, Feiffer began as an assistant for writer-artist Will Eisner, creator of the comic book-like comic strip The Spirit that appeared in a seven-page insert in American Sunday-newspaper comics sections. As Eisner recalled in 1978:
Feiffer walked into my studio after [World War II]. I had an office on Wall Street, as I recall. I forget the year it was, but it couldn't have been earlier than '46 or '47. Feiffer walked in and asked me for a job and said he'd work at any price, which immediately attracted me. He began working as just a studio man — he would do erasing, cleanup... Gradually it became very clear that he could write better than he could draw and preferred it, indeed — so he wound up doing balloons [i.e., dialog]. First he was doing balloons based on stories that I'd create. I would start a story off and say, "Now here I want the Spirit to do the following things — you do the balloons, Jules." Gradually, he would take over and do stories entirely on his own, generally based on ideas we'd talked about. I'd come in generally with the first page, then he would pick it up and carry it from there.[3]
Before this, in 1947, when Feiffer asked for a raise, Eisner instead gave him his own page in The Spirit section,[4] where the 18-year-old Feiffer wrote and drew his first comic strip, Clifford (1949-51), published in six newspapers.[4]
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.[5][6]
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.
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.[5] David Kamp reviewed the book in The New York Times:
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. He illustrated the children's book classic The Phantom Tollbooth. His non-fiction includes the book The Great Comic Book Heroes (an extract of which Quentin Tarantino adapted for a speech in his film Kill Bill).
His autobiography, Backing into Forward: A Memoir (Doubleday, 2010), received rave reviews from the New York Times [8] and Publishers Weekly:
Feiffer's plays include Little Murders (1967), The White House Murder Case and Grown Ups. After his screenplay for Mike Nichols's film Carnal Knowledge (1971), he scripted Robert Altman's Popeye, Alain Resnais' I Want to Go Home and the film adaptation of Little Murders.
The original production of HOLD ME! was directed by Caymichael Patten and opened at The American Place Theatre, Subplot Cafe, as part of their American Humorist Series on January 13, 1977. The production was aired nationally on Showtime in 1981.
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.
In 1961, he was the recipient of a special George Polk Memorial Award for his cartoons, and he won a 1961 Academy Award for his animated short Munro. In 1969 and 1970, his plays Little Murders and The White House Murder Case both won Obie and Outer Circle Critics Awards. 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.[9] He received the Creativity Foundation's Laureate in 2006.[10] He also won a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Writers Guild of America.
He has been honored with major retrospectives at the New York Historical Society, the Library of Congress and The School of Visual Arts. His artwork is exhibited at and represented by Chicago's Jean Albano Gallery. In 1996, Feiffer donated his papers and several hundred original cartoons and book illustrations to the Library of Congress.
| Awards and achievements | ||
|---|---|---|
| Preceded by Jeff MacNelly |
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Editorial Cartooning 1986 |
Succeeded by Berke Breathed |
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