The Comic-Book Artist Who Mastered Space and Time

The Atlantic

09-04-2025

I use the word comix to describe my art form not as a misspelling of comics, which would stress the medium's roots in the 19th-century newspaper funnies, and only in passing reference to the ' underground comix ' of the 1960s, whose name pointed to their X-rated 'adult' content. I think of the word as co-mix, and lose the hyphen to focus on the fusion of two separate mediums of expression—words and pictures—into one. It's a mongrel art—a mutt!—and every great master of comix must find a new way to use the distinct skills of writing and drawing to create a new way of transforming time into space. One very short strip by Jules Feiffer helped me understand the full implications of what that meant.
In his astonishingly varied career, Feiffer, who died in January at the age of 95, made his mark as a screenwriter, a playwright, an author, an illustrator, and more, but his work as a comix artist was at the core. Like the other great masters of co-mixing, he expanded what was possible in our medium, and was a trailblazer in seeking out a new audience that wasn't just kids anymore.
Feiffer got his first job as a 17-year-old assistant to the great Will Eisner, the creator of The Spirit, a weekly newspaper supplement about a masked crimefighter in a sophisticated film noir–like world. Over the next 10 years, Feiffer sharpened his talents and submitted work to book publishers and newspaper syndicates that seemed to like what he did but had no idea how to sell it. Then, in 1956, he walked into the offices of the fledgling Village Voice, which had just started up the year before, and was invited to do the first alternative-weekly comic strip. Two generations of artists (Matt Groening, Lynda Barry, David Lynch, and so many more) would follow a similar path through the alt-weeklies.
Feiffer did his Voice strips for more than 40 years (with no pay for the first eight!). The paper gave him space to hone his style and themes, as well as time to find an audience eager for something that was not like anything else. His skills as a draftsman were rather modest in his early years, but from the get-go, he showed a formidable talent for dialogue. He was an astute political satirist and a perceptive analyst of the human condition. Well versed in the Freudian thought that permeated 1950s America, Feiffer and Charles Schulz (the creator of Peanuts) were arguably the first cartoonists to give their characters inner lives. Schulz portrayed his Peanuts gang as small adults; Feiffer's adults are all neurotic overgrown children. Charlie Brown is a hapless loser, and Bernard Mergendeiler, one of Feiffer's recurring characters, is a hopeless schlemiel—a grown-up, Jewish Charlie Brown. Both artists were sensitive barometers of their times.
Feiffer's strip was unique—until other cartoonists 'borrowed' his approach. He generally steered clear of dialogue balloons and panel borders. His scratchy lines were influenced by Saul Steinberg and William Steig, and indicated that he was hip to Picasso, Paul Klee, and George Grosz, as well as to his childhood-favorite old masters—including Elzie Segar (Popeye), Crockett Johnson (Barnaby), and his beloved mentor, Eisner.
He knew the kinetic language of comix intimately, but most of the work that made him famous was remarkably static—the same face or figure repeated with minor variations over all six to eight panels. 'I thought that for the work to be effective, the movement had to be very subtle or nonexistent. I had to sneak up on the reader … so I had to have a frozen camera,' he explained in an interview. 'And most important to me was the storytelling, that the flow had to be very smooth.'
The static figures act like a metronome, marking time between the stanzas of his sharp-witted soliloquies and dialogues; the gestures and expressions function as stage directions. This strategy worked for him for about 10 years—and then began to bore him silly. Feiffer would regularly let his angst-ridden modern dancer (a character based on an old girlfriend) hijack a whole strip, and she'd leap gracefully through all the panels, offering a Dance to Variety.
Eventually, the artist broke out of his self-imposed prison, letting his lines and figures become jazzier, often drawing directly in ink without any preliminary penciling. In 1958, Playboy offered him space to spread his wings, to work in color and occasionally do multipage features such as Hostileman, about a deeply neurotic superhero drawn in the flashy comic-book layouts that Feiffer had devoured as a kid. As time went on, Feiffer became more and more graphically daring, and in 1979, he even drew a graphic novel avant la lettre, Tantrum —'a novel-in-cartoons,' per the jacket copy, about a middle-aged man literally turning back the clock to avoid adult responsibilities and become a toddler again.
Notably, the passing of time became a recurring subject in Feiffer's long and fruitful career. He wasn't just a master of turning time into space; he was the grand master of comix timing. One classic example of this is his minimalist tour de force, Oh God! It is, in one sense, sexually explicit for the time it was published, but also completely abstract—just a series of black boxes, perhaps in a bedroom.This variation on blackout comedy sketches is a master class in the formal potentials of co-mixing words and pictures, and it made an indelible impression on me.
Borders, which Feiffer so rarely used, were essential here. The spaces between each panel clearly demarcate one moment in time from the next. The lettering is in Feiffer's distinctive hand, made with the same strokes he uses for his drawings—his writing and drawing are extensions of each other. In the first four boxes on page one, Bernard and Joyce are each reduced to a straight line, a minimalist abstraction of the speech-balloon tails that usually point to characters' mouths. Their two blocks of dialogue in the first panel thrust down at steep angles that will converge somewhere below the panel border. The text gets smaller and quieter in the next three panels, followed by three extraordinary solid panels of inky blackness. Silence settles in after the intense activity above. On the left side of the last panel on the first page, Bernard asks after Joyce in 'normal'-size lettering. But the entire right half of that last panel on page one remains black—one more half-beat of stillness.
Dialogue resumes on the first tier of page two, interrupted by only one panel of blackness. I asked Feiffer about those panels once: 'Why three boxes first and only one on the second page?' He paused, did a sort of Fred Astaire–style soft-shoe step, and said, 'Well, as Jack Benny once said, 'In comedy, timing is everything.''
In the panel following that single black box, Joyce and Bernard's affectionate dialogue continues. In the next row, Bernard declares his love for Joyce, and a curtain of black silence shrouds her side of the panel. This is followed by a direct repeat of the last box on page one—'Joyce?'—and another silence. And in the last panel of the comic, Bernard's half is silent as Joyce delivers her punch line.
Oh God. How beautifully choreographed! When the master of timing departed our temporal world for a large and silent india-ink panel nine days shy of his 96th birthday, the cartoonist left behind an enormous body of work that still dances on the page.