Latest news with #JulesFeiffer
Yahoo
09-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
The Comic-Book Artist Who Mastered Space and Time
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. [Read: My friend Jules Feiffer] 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 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. [Read: A high-water mark in American mass culture] 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. Article originally published at The Atlantic
Yahoo
18-02-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Jules Feiffer, Pulitzer-winning cartoonist whose satirical skewerings ran in The Sunday Telegraph
Jules Feiffer, who has died aged 95, was one of America's most celebrated political cartoonists, turning a satirical eye on some of his country's most turbulent moments for nearly half a century. Feiffer started drawing weekly strip cartoons, initially called 'Sick, Sick, Sick', later simply 'Feiffer', for The Village Voice in New York, articulating the concerns of perplexed, neurotic liberal New Yorkers and exposing the hypocrisies and pomposities of US politicians. Feiffer explained that his work explored 'how people use language not to communicate, and the use of power in relationships'. In one cartoon, satirising the politically correct obsession with nomenclature, an old man says to himself: 'I used to think I was poor… Then they told me I wasn't poor, I was Needy… Then they told me it was self-defeating to think of myself as needy, I was Deprived… Then they told me deprived was a bad image, I was Underprivileged… Then they told me underprivileged was overused. I was Disadvantaged… I still don't have a dime… But I have a great vocabulary.' Although generally liberal in his outlook, Feiffer was an equal-opportunities satirist, skewering the antics of politicians from LBJ (seen in one cartoon telling a lollipop-sucking child: 'In the interest of freedom and in the pursuit of peace, we have today bombed…'), Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan to Bill Clinton, and he became a vehement critic of the sort of liberal intellectualism that is oblivious to the violent forces that threaten social order. Feiffer's cartoons were syndicated to more than 100 US newspapers and ran in The Observer and The Sunday Telegraph. In 1986 he won a Pulitzer Prize for editorial cartooning. He combined his newspaper work with writing screenplays and stage plays in a similar satirical vein. He wrote the script for the Oscar-winning animated short Munro (1961), though his best-known screenplay was for Carnal Knowledge (1971), a comedy of sexual manners directed by Mike Nichols that followed the exploits of two old college friends (Jack Nicholson and Art Garfunkel) as they try and generally fail to negotiate the sexual revolution. The film, which co-starred Candice Bergen and (a mostly nude) Ann-Margret – who received an Oscar nomination for her role as a model 'with splendid features', as the Telegraph critic put it – was banned as obscene in Georgia, though the ruling was overturned by the US Supreme Court. According to Feiffer, its blunt honesty about male misogyny got him blacklisted in Hollywood for 10 years, though in 1980 he agreed to come up with the script for Robert Altman's Popeye, starring Robin Williams as the one-eyed, spinach-chomping sailor, whom Feiffer characterised as 'the flawed Everyman as Walt Whitman might have imagined him, Frank Capra directed him, and Samuel Beckett mixed with Eugene Ionesco hired to write his dialogue'. Not surprisingly, the end result did not go down well with critics, while the production was dogged by rows caused in part, one reviewer noted, by 'Altman's erratic behaviour [and] the arrival of his notorious consigliere Scotty Bushnell, who revelled in creating inter-departmental tension. Altman stopped speaking to his cinematographer... Everyone, meanwhile, stopped speaking to Feiffer.' As a writer for the stage Feiffer often had better luck in London than in New York. His first full-length play, Little Murders (1967), a response to the assassination of John F Kennedy, later turned into a film starring Elliot Gould, was a black comedy set against a backdrop of mounting urban violence. A photographer becomes so disillusioned with life that he begins to specialise in pictures of excrement. As a result he becomes a celebrity and eventually joins in the mayhem by shooting passers-by. Hostile notices sank the New York production, but in London, staged by the RSC at the Aldwych, it was voted best foreign play of the year by London critics, the Telegraph's WA Darlington observing that it showed great 'vitality and comic power'. The only dissenting voice was that of the Lord Chamberlain, who objected to the use of the word 's--t', but found 'c--p' to be an acceptable substitute. Encouraged by the reception, Feiffer (who claimed to be an aficionado of London parks) chose London for the public premiere of his next major play, God Bless (1978), though with less happy results. The production, again by the RSC at the Aldwych, starred Roy Dotrice as William Brackman, a wheelchair-bound 110-year-old elder statesman and presidential adviser, a one-time liberal with his eye on the main chance. His reveries are interrupted when two radical ex-students of his at Harvard blow up the Washington Monument and invade the White House. The revolutionaries turn out to be agents provocateurs hired by a Right-wing president in an attempt to discredit Left-wing protest and foment a backlash. But as the 'revolutionaries' taste power, matters get out of hand and Brackman brokers an unlikely coalition, with disastrous results. 'I was trying to show what our heritage of pragmatic liberalism has brought us in the last 20 years,' Feiffer explained. 'I wanted to do a political play... of the Cold War and Vietnam and how innocent people, nice people, can become murderers.' But the reviews were almost uniformly hostile, the Telegraph's critic regretting that 'the steely control of Feiffer's cartoons has not here restrained him from excesses of fancy which explode meaninglessly in the theatre.' By his own admission, one of Feiffer's biggest earners was his friend Norton Juster's 1961 children's fantasy classic The Phantom Tollbooth, for which he did the charming, scratchy illustrations. It has sold more than five million copies and has been adapted into a film, play and opera. As 'Feiffer' the comic strip retired in 2000 ('when I grew nostalgic over Bill Clinton, I knew it was time to go,' he joked), Feiffer reinvented himself as a children's book author and illustrator, and also wrote graphic novels. The second of three children, Jules Ralph Feiffer was born in the Bronx on January 26 1929 to Jewish immigrants from Poland. His father, David, was a salesman who struggled during the depression. His mother, Rhoda, described by her son as 'a control freak whose control did her no good at all', supported the family selling fashion drawings to department stores. He enjoyed drawing as a child and wanted to make it his career, but at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, where he attended art classes, drawing seemed more difficult than it first appeared. Finding a good caption helped, and he decided to become a cartoonist. Will Eisner, creator of 'The Spirit', a popular crime-fighting strip (and the main feature of a tabloid-sized comic), was his great hero and, aged 16, Feiffer talked his way into working under him. 'I thought I was a finished cartoonist,' Feiffer recalled. '[Eisner] looked through my samples. He disagreed. He thought I was finished as a cartoonist.' But Eisner allowed him to work as an unpaid 'groupie', and helped him to introduce 'Clifford', about the adventures of a little boy, a comic strip that showcased 'the sort of self-pity that made me famous'. Drafted in 1951 into the US Army Signals Corps, Feiffer concocted a plan to fake a nervous breakdown to escape possible combat duty in Korea and spent much of his time drawing anti-military cartoons and honing what he described as his 'contempt for abusive authority'. Discharged in 1953, he worked at various jobs, getting himself fired every so often so that he could draw the dole until he was given a slot in The Village Voice, where for the first eight years he worked unpaid. His pessimistic view of human nature owed much to McCarthyism. In 1953 he attended the memorial service of the actor J Edward Bromberg, who had died a couple of years earlier after prolonged McCarthyist persecution. There, he saw the playwright Clifford Odets denounce the state for having caused the death of his friend – but, a week later, he was appalled to hear that Odets had supplied names to the House Un-American Activities Committee and had fingered Bromberg as his recruiter. Hugh Hefner, who hired him to draw cartoons for Playboy, was the first person to pay Feiffer for his work, winning him a national audience before any of his work was syndicated: 'I was amazed at how I started getting college speaking dates within a year of appearing in Playboy.' Feiffer's other work included several more plays, among them The White House Murder Case, in which a nerve gas is released by mistake, killing 750 soldiers, and White House staff ponder how to spin the tragedy to the voting public ahead of a presidential election. In addition he published several children's books and what he called 'novels-in-cartoons', and a 2010 memoir, Backing into Forward. Feiffer's marriages, to Judy Sheftel and Jennifer Allen, were dissolved. In 2016, he married the writer JZ Holden, who survives him with a daughter from his first marriage and two daughters from his second. Jules Feiffer, born January 26 1929, died January 17 2025 Broaden your horizons with award-winning British journalism. Try The Telegraph free for 1 month with unlimited access to our award-winning website, exclusive app, money-saving offers and more.
