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Jules Feiffer (1929-) |
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American cartoonist, novelist, playwright, and screen writer. Jules Feiffer's simple drawings have penetrated modern life, politics and the strange habits of people and attracted attention in newspapers and albums all over the world. His sparse style has also given rise to numerous imitators. "The whole point to drawing was to make it up out of your own imagination. Even Father and Indiana Jones was made up. Father didn't say: "Draw me" to Jimmy. He would never have said it. And Jimmy would never have done it, because why be an artist if you are going to waste your talent drawing what was there in front of your nose? It didn't make sense." (from The Man in the Ceiling, 1993) Jules Feiffer was born in the Bronx, New York City, the son of David Feiffer and Rhoda Davis Feiffer; they were both immigrant Jews. Rhoda Davis was a fashion designer. "Since my father perennially failed at business and his various other jobs didn’t last that long, it was my mother’s three-dollar sketches that brought us through hard times," he recalled in Backing Into Forward (2010). Feiffer began to draw at the age of 6. His early favorites were Flash Gordon, Popeye, and Terry and the Pirates. After studies at James Monroe High School, Feiffer entered the Art Students' League. "I was desperate to be a cartoonist." From 1947 to 1951 Feiffer studied at the Pratt Institute while working as an assistant on Will Eisner's classical comic The Spirit. For the back page he created in 1949 his first own comic feature, Clifford. Feiffer has said that he grew up presuming the Spirit was Jewish. During his army time Feiffer made animated cartoons for the Signal
Corps. "The army made a satirist out of me," Feiffer wrote in his
autobiography. "It didn't make a man of me, as promised by my
sergeants and lieutenants." (Backing Into Forward, 2010) After return to civilian life he worked at
several jobs. Munro, his long cartoon about a four-year-old boy
who gets drafted into the Army by mistake, arose partially as a
reaction authoritarian structures. The Village Voice began
in
1956 to print Feiffer's political cartoons, in which he took a sharp
look at the Eisenhower-McCarthy Cold War era. The weekly comic
strip, usually six to eight panels containing interior monologie or
dialogue, was first called Sick Sick Sick with the subtitle A Guide to Non-Confident Living, and then Feiffer. Feiffer's most famous fictional long-running characters are the modern dancer in black, who is moving all the time in opposition to other figures who just talk, and Bernard Mergendeiler, a victim-hero and psychological wreck devoured by tics and obsessed with sex. Feiffer depicted him with the undertones of self-hatred and self-pity. "I composed him out of my own life and the lives of friends." (Jules Feiffer's America, from Eisenhower to Reagan by Jules Feiffer. 1982) Other characters are also more or less portrayed with black humour – the spineless men and neurotic and poisonous women. In 1958 several of the strips were published in book form under the title Sick, Sick, Sick. Since then the strips have been reprinted in both hardbound and paperback forms. Feiffer's comic strip antiheroes also appeared in a play, The Explainers, staged at Chicago's Playwrights Cabaret in 1961. Feiffer's other productions include a novel, illustrations to children's books, and plays. In 1967 he gained fame with the musical comedy Little Murders (1968, also made into film). The play ends with the Newquist family gunning down passing pedestrians from their apartment window. However, he had been active in the theatre for a long time, but his works were usually short pieces in revue form. These include Crawling Around (1961) and Only When I Laugh (1967). The White House Murder Case (1969) dealt with violence and madness, shifting the scene between the White House and a battlefield where American soldiers fight against Brazil. In the fantasy comedy Knock Knock (1976) Joan of Arc changes the lives of two elderly recluses. The 1976 Broadway production starred Lynn Redgrave as St. Joan. Grownups (1981) was a marriage drama. Carnal Knowledge (1971), for which Feiffer wrote the script, was banned in Georgia and subsequently became an issue in the U.S. Supreme Court, which ruled the the film was not obscene. Jack Nicholson and Art Garfunkel,the two male leads, are college seniors; their adventures are partly based on the The Village Voice characters Bernard and Huey. The narrative traces their sexual encounters from the repressive '50s through the free-love '60s. Feiffer had been sceptical about the star of Easy Rider playing Jonathan, a Jew from the Bronx, and a womanizer who uses sexual conquest as a substitute for love. "The first time I do it," says Nicholson, "I want her beautiful. I don't want to waste it on some beast." The director said: "Believe me when I say he's going to be the most important actor since Brando." In the end of the film Nicholson is a nearly impotent chauvinist and Garfunkel a middle-aged hippie. Feiffer was amazed at Nicholson's performance: "My recollection is that Jack got all of the stuff on the first take. Particularly, I remember watching the shacking-up scene. I couldn't believe Jack's directness and simplicity and intelligence. He got everything." (from Jack's Life by Patrick McGilligan, 1994) Feiffer didn't want Nicholson for the role as a Jew from the Bronx, as the part was originally written. Mike Nichols, the director, fought Feiffer on the casting and finally convinced him to accept the actor. Ann-Margaret won a Best Supporting Actress Oscar nomination for her portrayal of Bobbie. Popeye (1980) was based on characters created by E.C. Segar, the most famous of which are a one-eyed, craggy-faced seadog named Popeye, J. Willington Wimpy, who exhibited a love of hamburgers, Swee'pea, Popeye's "adoptid infink," and Olive, his "sweet patootie". Feiffer's animated cartoon Munro won an Academy Award in 1961. "Cartooning was supposed to be fun. If it couldn't be fun, why do it? If it was going to be a job, like his father's, why put up with it? What was the point of drawing cartoons when the fun was left out?" (from The Man in the Ceiling) Feiffer's books for children include The Man in the Ceiling (1993), A Barrel of Laughs, a Vale of Tears (1995), Meanwhile (1997), I Lost My Bear (1998), and Bark, George
(1999), originally written for his daughter Julie. It was named one of
the Great Children's Books by the New York Public Library. A Barrel of Laughs, a Vale of Tears was
about a prince, Roger, whose sense of humor is too much for the king
and his wizard. Feiffer comments on Roger's adventures, and tells the
reader what will happen in the story. In The Man in the Ceiling,
Feiffer returned to his own childhood feelings as an aspiring
cartoonist – the protagonist Jimmy Jibbett has devoted himself to
cartooning and has high hopes about his future. I Lost My Bear tells of a little girl, who experiences adventures while searching for her lost plaything. "The various sizes of Feiffer's hand-lettered scrawls play a crucial part in creating the emotional atmosphere of each scene. The tale is simple and universal enough for the youngest listeners to chuckle over, but it will probably please older readers too, even adults. For, as the recent narrowly averted international Winnie-the-Pooh crisis demonstrates (the original stuffed animals were threatened with leaving New York's Donnell Library Center and being returned to England), the appeal of the bear has nothing to do with age. Feiffer thus appears timely in topic and engagingly empathetic in knowing that a teddy bear is far more than a plaything and that certain children's toys are well aware of what is in the hearts of their owners." (Krystyna Poray Goddu in The New York Times, May 17, 1998) In 1961 Feiffer married Judith Sheftel, a film production and
publishing executive. They had met through the British theatre critic
Kenneth Tynan, hired by The New Yorker
to review plays. The marriage ended in divorce in 1983. With his second
wife, the journalist Jenny Allen, Feiffer cooperated on The Long Chalkboard (2006), for which he created the illustrations. Kill My Mother (2014),
a graphic novel, was a tribute to film noir and classic detective
fiction. Drawing the book pushed Feiffer to rethink his way of
approaching art and toying with it. "I spent over forty years doing Village Voice
strips, almost never doing backgrounds," Feiffer said in an interview.
"So I had to completely rethink my entire approach to drawing, at the
age of eighty." ("It was a complete revolution for me": a conversation with Jules Feiffer by Greg Hunter, The Comics Journal, August 25, 2014) As political cartoonist Feiffer was particularly unyielding in his
attack on President Johnson's Vietnam politics and on Richard Nixon,
who was his most constant target. One strip showed President Johnson
looking from his Oval Office at peace demonstrators, who are dragged
away by the White House police. "Freedom of speech is one of our most
precious liberties," says the president. "Yes, Mr. President," answers
Dean Rusk. Feiffer on Nixon: The Cartoon Presidency
(1974) was a character study of a kind of
American Ubu Roi. Nixon says: "I believe Senator Kennedy believes
what he believes sincerely, as I believe that I believe what I believe
sincerely." The collection spans 14 years from 1960 through 1974, when Nixon resigned the Presidency. In 1986 Feiffer received the Pulitzer Prize in editorial cartooning and in 2006 he was honored with the Benjamin Franklin Creativity Laureate Award. After 40 years of work in The Village Voice, Feiffer left the magazine in a salary dispute. Disillusioned with political affairs, Feiffer stopped making political cartoons in the late 1990s. For further reading: 'Jules Feiffer,' in Focus on Playwrights: Portraits and Interviews by Susan Johann (2016); Out of Line: The Art of Jules Feiffer by Martha Fay, Jules Feiffer and Leonard S. Marcus (2013); Backing Into Forward: A Memoir by Jules Feiffer (2010); 'Feiffer' by M.H. [Maurice Horn], in 100 Years of American Newspaper Comics, ed. by Maurice Horn (1996) Selected works:
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