A Dance to Feiffer

Ten ways that Jules Feiffer changed comics and culture

by Michael Tisserand

1. Launched Alt Weekly Comics

The origin story for alt-weekly comic begins in 1956, when 27-year-old Jules Ralph Feiffer, fresh from apprenticing with cartoonist Will Eisner and serving a stint in the Army, was hitting the pavement of New York City, looking up publishers, trying to catch a break. He believed himself to be in a professional Catch-22: His work was too offbeat to publish without a famous name, and he’d never get that famous name if he never got published.

Finally, he walked into the offices of an upstart new publication called The Village Voice, then in its first year. Here, his work was embraced. Sure, he wouldn’t get paid, at least at first, but “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, and the ever-toxic males Bernard and Huey — but Feiffer usually preferred characters to emerge and depart nameless from his world, his readers allowed a few moments to eavesdrop on their conversations.

The strip “Feiffer” ran for 44 years, earning the cartoonist Feiffer a Pulitzer Prize before he gave up his weekly deadline to pursue other work. The comic would inspire numerous cartoonists whose work appeared in the dailies, especially Garry Trudeau, creator of “Doonesbury.” 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.” That would include 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: “[W]ithout a Jules Feiffer, there might not be a Homer Simpson.”

2. Invented Superhero Scholarship

Feiffer was at the top of his career in 1965 when, egged on by fellow comics fan E.L. Doctorow, he published his influential work of comics scholarship and appreciation, The Great Comic Book Heroes. In it, Feiffer offered a personal reflection on comics that served as both a critical study and a rejoinder to Fredric Wertham’s anti-comics screed Seduction of the Innocent, which had rattled nervous parents eleven years earlier. Like Wertham, Feiffer thought that superhero comics influenced young minds. But as Feiffer saw it, it was for the better: “[A] child, simply to save his sanity, must go underground. Have a place to hide where he cannot be got at by grownups. … A relief zone. And the basic sustenance for this relief was, in my day, comic books.”

Appearing a decade before Bill Blackbeard’s landmark The Smithsonian Collection of Newspaper Comics, Feiffer’s work both paved the way for further scholarship and helped inspire a generation of cartoonists to see their work differently. In Martha Far’s essential Out of Line: The Art of Jules Feiffer, cartoonist Art Spiegelman recalled that he once could recite sections of the book from memory: "This art form was beneath contempt. … Jules found a tone that was really perfect for reintroducing it into the world.”

3. Fought the Army with a Cartoon

“I went insane in the army,” wrote Feiffer 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. By the second week of training at Fort Dix, he could barely remember how to wisecrack. “I lost my power of New York speech,” he said. “I began to distrust what came out of my mouth.”

But he could still draw. When the higher-ups began requesting that Feiffer letter their names and company insignia on their uniforms, his talents got him out of most of basic training, and he eventually landed a position with the Signal Corps. While sitting in the Army’s desk, he began the story that would become Munro, a tale of a four-year-old child who is drafted into the military and can’t convince anyone it is a mistake. It is a parable of rules and regulations triumphing over basic humanity, all delivered with the cheery tone of a children’s book. Remembered Feiffer: “I wanted to be subversive, but I wanted to get away with it.”

After publishing Munro in 1959, Feiffer teamed with animator Gene Dietch, with whom he had previously worked at the Terrytoons studio making animation for children’s shows including Captain Kangaroo. The short film Munro had its American premiere on October 5, 1961, at Radio City Music Hall, where it was shown in front of the feature attraction Breakfast at Tiffany. It received an Oscar the following year.

More than most adaptations of comics, the movie Munro skillfully translates the look, rhythms and the sharp satire of Feiffer’s original work. Feiffer’s cry of rebellion against his own military service would a harbinger of Vietnam-era military satires to follow, including M*A*S*H (directed by Robert Altman, with whom Feiffer would work on the movie Popeye) and Dr. Strangelove (for which Feiffer had been approached by Stanley Kubrick to write, but ultimately decided it wasn’t for him). Yet at the dawn of a decade that would see so many of the country’s children in uniform, the sweet, befuddled and ultimately heartbreaking innocence of the character Munro would give Feiffer’s (and Dietch’s) work a lasting impact.

4. Broke Up Simon and Garfunkel

OK, not really. But Paul Simon did once say of Art Garfunkel, “When he agreed to make Carnal Knowledge, something was broken between us.” What’s beyond dispute is that two of Feiffer’s forays into screenwriting — Carnal Knowledge and Little Murders, both from 1971 — both captured and altered a significant slice of early 1970s culture.

In 2022, Ben Reiser, who programs film for the University of Wisconsin Cinematheque and the Wisconsin Film Festival, learned first-hand of these movies’ ability to provoke when he showed Carnal Knowledge and Little Murders to audiences who, for the most part, had never seen them. “Both of these films felt more relevant and resonant than they did on initial release,” Reiser says. “Little Murders is a desperate warning about societal anger and near-constant gun violence in America that played in 1971 as a dystopian fantasy but today feels more like a documentary. Carnal Knowledge is an unflinching deep-dive into toxic masculinity, a term that hadn’t even been invented in 1971. Neither film has lost the power to shock, offend and provoke animated discussion and debate.”

Left off many Feiffer film lists is the undervalued Popeye, which in 1980 brought together Feiffer and director Robert Altman, and stars Robin Williams and Shelly Duvall. It’s a big, colorful, frenetic musical comedy that draws real inspiration from E.C. Segar’s original comics, which had long been a favorite of Feiffer’s. Also left off: The nearly forgotten, next-to-impossible-to-find I Want to Go Home, a dark comedy about an American cartoonist in Paris being tortured by his own feline creation.

Finally, although Feiffer can’t be blamed for breaking up Simon and Garfunkel, he does deserve some credit for uniting Fred Willard and Christopher Guest. Years before working together on Guest mockumentaries like Waiting for Guffman, Best in Show and A Mighty Wind, Willard and Guest met in 1969 while working on an Off Broadway production of Little Murders.

5. Put America on the Couch

The first title of Feiffer’s comic and the title of his first book, Sick Sick Sick, also served as his diagnosis for his readers, for the country, and for the cartoonist himself. The book opens with a theatrical flourish: Alone on a blank page, a small child complains that he is eleven years old and can’t play baseball. But he decides he’s not too old to learn, musing that “it’s not like I was thirteen.” Then he tries to toss the ball, drops it, and sulks off.

Turn the page and we’re in a psychiatrist’s office. A man in sunglasses and a toga is on the couch: “Alright, so I killed him but I didn’t know he was my father.” A couple panels (or non-panels, as Feiffer chose to forego typical comics borders between scenes) later, he defends marrying his mother, saying, “It’s not like I was sick or something.”

Feiffer’s work, the cartoonist has said, began in therapy: “[W]hat would come out of therapy in this kind of freewheeling association of conversation would sooner or later be introduced into the weekly strip.” Indeed, when Feiffer’s strip first appeared in the Voice, it was a kind of golden era for psychotherapy in New York City — especially among Feiffer’s readers. “A certain group of young people were bitten by the Freudian bug, and the strip was the only place they found themselves represented in those days,” he recalled.

Along with a legion of New York nightclub comedians, among them Woody Allen (whom Robert Shelton reviewed in 1962 as “a flesh and blood walk-on from the Jules Feiffer casebook”) Feiffer’s comics introduced ideas from therapy to a national audience. Time magazine recognized it in 1963: “As a sketch-and-word man, Jules Feiffer trades heavily in the guilt-edged in-securities of modern America. Meaning well and putting their trust in Freud, Feiffer's cartoon characters are forever trying to find themselves and at the same time break through to others. ‘Do I really love her,’ Feiffer youths keep asking themselves, ‘or is she just a fertility symbol?’”

6. Betrayed His Gender

In the Feiffer universe, recurring characters are a rarity, and named characters even more so. Which is only one reason why Bernard Mergendeiler and his frenemy Huey are so memorable. With Bernard appearing in 1957 and Huey a year later, they can be seen as prototypes for male chauvinism a decade before that term was popularized, and for toxic masculinity, which wouldn’t be named until the 1980s.

The wispy-haired, blank-faced anti-hero Bernard mainly serves as a human scratching post while Huey, who seemed to take his early fashion cues from movies-era Elvis, is all claws. Like the characters in Doonesbury, they both aged and reflected their changing times, which is not to say they ever grew or matured. Feiffer satirized the hypocrisy of the suave playboys that sported around in 1950s America — which is why it was both improbable and inevitable that Bernard and Huey would find their way as a regular strip into Playboy itself. Many years later, when asked by this writer how he managed to draw his satire of masculinity in the pages of a magazine that usually sought to stroke, not cause to wither, male ego, Feiffer merely shrugged and said, “Why shouldn’t I bite the hand that feeds me?”

Collected in book form in 1965 as The Unexpurgated Memoirs of Bernard Mergendeiler, Feiffer’s bromantic fables found their way to screen in 2015, when director Dan Mirvish located a Feiffer script that had been considered lost for three decades. “Few writers have been able to lampoon straight, white male insecurity while simultaneously speaking to it more sincerely than this one,” wrote Glenn Kenny in his film review for The New York Times.

7. Made Subversive Books for Kids

For legions of children and their adults, Feiffer is best known as the illustrator for Norton Juster’s timeless (except for Tock the watchdog) book 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. Feiffer recalled that they developed a friendship based on each trying to one-up the other in the wordplay that would find its way into The Phantom Tollbooth. Although Feiffer later grumbled that Juster “neglected to tell me that he was writing a classic,” his illustrations would become forever linked to the work, as indispensable as Punch political cartoonist John Tenniel’s work for Lewis Carrol’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, artist E.H. Shepard’s drawings of Winnie the Pooh, or “Krazy Kat” cartoonist George Herriman’s contributions to Don Marquis’ Archy and Mehitabel stories.

Despite the success of The Phantom Tollbooth, Feiffer was reluctant to write his own childrens’ books, preferring to leave that field to others, including his friend Maurice Sendak. That changed shortly after he departed from the Voice in the 1990s. He soon began writing and drawing a lively series of picture books that are filled with sly, satirical messages of their own, written for, as he once put it, “that kid who lived a life of innocence, mixed with confusion and consternation, disappointment and dopey humor.” Among these is Bark, George, a story about childhood and confused identity in which a puzzled puppy tries to please both parents and a doctor, who is presented as a veterinarian but appears more like a psychiatrist. George, like Feiffer himself, has the last word.

8. Advanced Comics Journalism

Photographs weren’t allowed in Judge Julius Hoffman’s courtroom during the prosecution of Abbie Hoffman, Tom Hayden and other protesters who’d assembled in Chicago for the 1968 Democratic National Convention. But Hoffman didn’t count on Jules Feiffer attending the infamous legal circus that would become known as the Trial of the Chicago Seven. Over a four-month period, Feiffer made numerous visits to the courtroom and created 250 pen-and-ink illustrations of the proceedings, publishing a selection of them in his Grove Press book Pictures at a Prosecution: Drawings and Texts from the Chicago Conspiracy Trial.

The practice of cartoonists attending and depicting news events has a long and storied tradition, from Tad Dorgan covering the racially charged “Battle of the Century” 1910 prizefight between Jack Johnson and Jim Jeffries, to Homer Davenport’s portraits of Titanic survivors and Art Young’s depictions of the Haymarket prisoners. Bill Mauldin’s World War II cartoons are among the most incisive and compassionate reports of a soldier’s life ever published. Contemporary comics journalists include Sarah Glidden and Joe Sacco, whose Footnotes in Gaza received the Ridenhour Book Prize for investigative journalism.

In his courtroom scenes, Feiffer bridged the eras of Davenport and Sacco. He used an immediate, improvisatory line in portraits that are accompanied by hand-scrawled descriptions and dialogues, with titles such as “Marshal closing Judy Collins’ mouth as she tries to sing ‘Where Have All The Flowers Gone.’” Feiffer’s satire cuts most sharply when Hoffman ordered Bobby Seale physically gagged in court: Feiffer turns the comics blackface tradition on its head by showing Hoffman himself in blackface as the judge imitates Seale’s voice. Repackaged by historian Jon Weiner in 2006 as Conspiracy in the Streets, Feiffer’s comics journalism, like all worthy journalism, takes us to the very heart of places and times we’d otherwise be unable to visit.

9. Foretold Trump in Nixon Cartoons

Maybe it was that Feiffer’s cousin was Roy Cohn (really). Or perhaps it was because his psychological approach to writing and comics enabled Feiffer to peer into the psyche of a nation as closely as he could examine his characters. In his political work in the 1960s and 1970s, Jules Feiffer most clearly saw both into and around Richard Nixon, and in doing so, he also saw the emergence of Donald Trump.

Shortly after he published his collection Feiffer on Nixon (which, as luck would have it, came out right after Nixon resigned), Feiffer talked about his political work with his old friend Studs Terkel. There are some presidents, Feiffer said, who don’t seem to have term limits, and instead serve as “president of our minds and our psyches and our consciences.”

Feiffer satirized each presidential administration beginning with Eisenhower, but his Nixon work was often less about Nixon than the country that had elected him. Such was the case with the nightmarish comic drawn shortly before Nixon’s resignation but not published by newspapers until after that final helicopter salute. Writes Feiffer over a panel of identical faces: “Once, there was a people who discovered their leader had no values, no morals and no ethics. And they said: ‘Someone should do something to get rid him.’ But no one did.” Then Feiffer draws the inevitable outcome: a nation of little Nixon faces, all wondering what the former president could have done that was so bad.

Feiffer’s ferocious Trump cartoons were primarily published in the online Tablet Magazine, including 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. At times Feiffer explored the limits of his own satire in the face of a historic monstrosity. “He was our favorite sick joke,” he once said about the thirty-seventh president in words that could apply equally to the forty-fifth/forty-seventh. “But the joke was on us.”

10. Showed How to Dance to Spring, Again and Again

Like the unnamed dancer that he kept drawing (in different shapes and sizes) 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 playwright, screenwriter, graphic novelist, comics historian, memoirist, illustrator and teacher. Included in his later work was a three-part graphic novel series that borrowed heavily from film noir, with the first book memorably titled Kill My Mother. He started and completed that work when he was in his 80s, but he was already on to new things. Following that series, he set out to try science fiction, something had always wanted to do. At the time, he was 91.

How did he accomplish all this? “My professional life, for as long as I can remember, has maintained itself as a system of avoidances,” Feiffer has said. “Whatever I am supposed to be doing, I write or draw something else.”

It worked for Feiffer spectacularly. 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, 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.”

This article is an expanded version of an appreciation I published in The Daily Beast. You can watch my filmed interview with Jules Feiffer, followed by a conversation with cartoonists Liza Donnelly, Keith Knight and Matt Wuerker, here.

Rest in peace, Jules Feiffer.