How Jules Feiffer Changed American Comics—and Culture

The origin story of alt-weekly comics begins in 1956, as 27-year-old Jules Ralph Feiffer was hitting the pavements of New York City, fresh from apprenticing with cartoonist Will Eisner and serving a stint in the army. (“I went insane in the army,” Feiffer wrote in his rollicking 2010 memoir Backing Into Forward. The military, he had discovered, was no place for a smart-ass Jewish kid from the Bronx.)

Feiffer, who died on Jan. 17 at the age of 95, believed at the time that he was stuck in a professional Catch-22: His work was too offbeat to publish without a famous name, but he’d never get that famous name if he never got published. And then he walked into the offices of an upstart new publication called The Village Voice. Here, his work was embraced. Sure, he wouldn’t get paid—at least not at first—but his strip Sick Sick Sick, later retitled Feiffer, was launched.

It was a strip that looked different, talked different and acted different than anything before it. There were a few occasionally recurring characters—a dancer who began each performance with all the optimism of Charlie Brown running to the football; the ever-toxic males Bernard and Huey—but Feiffer usually preferred characters that emerged and departed nameless from his world, his readers allowed a few moments to eavesdrop on their conversations.

Feiffer ran for 44 years, earning the cartoonist a Pulitzer Prize before he gave up his weekly deadline to pursue other work. It would inspire numerous cartoonists whose work appeared in the dailies, weeklies and beyond; everyone from Lynda Barry to Derf Backderf to Chris Ware to Matt Groening, who began drawing the comic strip Life in Hell in the LA Weekly before launching The Simpsons. (Wrote Michael Cavna in The Washington Post: “Without a Jules Feiffer, there might not be a Homer Simpson.”) But Feiffer’s real contribution was to launch a new genre of comics that would stretch the form with characters, themes, language and visuals not previously imagined in the funny pages.

“Jules Feiffer is the man who invented the genre we call ‘alt-weekly cartooning,’ and everyone who came after him owes him an immense, unpayable debt of gratitude,” said Dan Perkins, who as Tom Tomorrow created the comic This Modern World.

(For legions of children and their adults, Feiffer is otherwise best known as the illustrator for Norton Juster’s classic The Phantom Tollbooth. Feiffer and Juster were neighbors; their friendship and ultimate collaboration was sparked one day when they met while taking out the garbage. “At least that’s how I choose to remember it,” Feiffer wrote in Backing Into Forward.)

In his political work in the 1960s and 1970s, Feiffer most clearly saw both into and around Richard Nixon—in doing so, he also presaged the emergence of Donald Trump.

Feiffer had satirized presidential administrations beginning with Eisenhower, but his Nixon work was often less about the president than the country which had elected him; his ferocious Trump cartoons, meanwhile, included a portrait of Trump with an internal monologue written down his oversized red tie, and another in which all a couple can say to each other—even during sex—is Trump’s name.

“He was our favorite sick joke,” he once said about the thirty-seventh president in words that could apply equally to the forty-fifth (and forty-seventh). “But the joke was on us.”

Like the unnamed performer that he kept drawing ever since she first appeared one March day in 1956, Feiffer never stopped inventing new moves. Although he will be remembered first and foremost as a cartoonist, he was also a comics scholar (with the landmark study The Great Comic Book Hero), a playwright, screenwriter, graphic novelist, memoirist, illustrator and teacher.

Endlessly inventive and just as endlessly self-inventing, Feiffer loved most of all to see himself as a dancer—specifically Fred Astaire, which is how he drew himself in a comics coda to his memoir. “He made what’s hard look easy. And that’s been a model to me my whole working life,” Feiffer wrote alongside the sketch, balancing a top hat and tripping fantastically around a cane. “Now the great thing about being a cartoonist… is that you can draw yourself as anything you like. So excuse me—as I finish my dance.”