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Arts|Jules Feiffer, Acerbic Cartoonist, Writer and Much Else, Dies at 95
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/21/arts/jules-feiffer-dead.html
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In his long-running Village Voice comic strip and in his many plays and screenplays, he took delight in skewering politics, relationships and human nature.
Jan. 21, 2025Updated 11:28 a.m. ET
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.
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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.
