Jules Feiffer: A Lefty With a Sense of Humor. How ’Bout That?
In its peak years, the ’50s to the ’90s, New York’s Village Voice newspaper had several signature elements.
These included, in no particular order: exhaustive and influential arts coverage; superb writers who seemed to have no word limits; extensive listings of apartments for rent; verbal food fights between columnists; exposes of and campaigns against powerful politicians, businesspeople and developers.
And Jules Feiffer.
For more than 30 years Jules Feiffer was the house cartoonist for a paper that had no comic strips, a commentator who made his point with six or eight drawings and a few dozen words.
He left the Voice soon after he turned 60, at which point he did everything but retire. He kept drawing and doing whatever crossed his mind, the same MO that had earlier led him to write movies (Carnal Knowledge) and Broadway shows (Little Murders). Through the rest of his life he wrote children’s books, children’s graphic novels, adult graphic novels, plays and occasional whimsy. Despite macular degeneration he was planning his next projects when he died Jan. 17 at the age of 95.
Over the years he scored a Pulitzer Prize, an Oscar and countless other honors for work that in sheer volume rivaled Picasso. But he remained best known for his weekly cartoons, which could swing from sharp political commentary to the insecurities and neuroses of the regular old people who filled his life in New York.
He could draw President Richard Nixon as a dark and menacing figure whose smug, evil smile said everything about how he planned to retaliate against “the press.” Then he might devote his next strip to a psychological snapshot of a regular old unnamed person who first says he’s been accused of being controlling and six panels later admits he is.
Sociologically, Feiffer was a student of neuroses and internal conflict, a godfather if not a father to Larry David. Politically, he was from the left side of the Left, with especially little patience for what he saw as hypocritical liberals. He echoed the famous Phil Ochs description of a liberal as someone who is “10 degrees to the left of center in good times, 10 degrees to the right of center if it affects them personally.”
As this would suggest, he distrusted most of the political and corporate world, a conviction he said was cemented by his military service in the early 1950s.
He got his start in professional cartooning at 16. With only modest talents in writing and artwork, he said, cartooning seemed like a place where he could combine two mediocre skills into one good one.
He spent his first 10 years working under the revered Will Eisner, which was mildly ironic because Eisner was best known for one of the most intricately detailed comics ever, The Spirit. Feiffer did more intricate work in his books and graphic novels, but in his cartoon strips he was a minimalist, using black and white lines to create caricatures. When the dialogue ran too long, he sometimes scrunched the last few words down into a corner, like when you’ve run out of space on a birthday card and you squeeze the last line or two so you don’t have to start over.
Eisner wasn’t alone among artists Feiffer admired. He was a big fan of Milt Caniff’s Terry and the Pirates and Al Capp’s Abbie an’ Slats, strips that featured elaborate artwork and backgrounds. He had an original Abbie an’ Slats framed on the wall of the Richmond Springs, New York, home where he worked until he died.
If Feiffer was not Vermeer, that wasn’t his goal. What he most admired about Eisner and Caniff was that their work made a point, and toward that end, subtlety wasn’t Feiffer’s priority.
One six-panel strip had President Lyndon Johnson asking four people if they believe what he says about Vietnam. All four say “No.” In the fifth panel, he asks a toddler, who says sure. In the sixth panel, Johnson announces that to promote peace, he has just authorized another bombing campaign.
On the neurosis front, another six-panel strip had a man sitting across from a woman at a restaurant. In the first panel he says, “Me.” In the second panel, he says “Me me me.” In the third panel, he says “Me me me me me me.” In the fourth panel he says “Me” two dozen times. She looks at him adoringly. In the fifth panel, she says, “I.” In the sixth panel, he yawns.
The presence of Feiffer in the Voice probably reassured readers the Left could have a sense of humor. Beyond that, his work helped inspire a succeeding generation of cartoonists and comic artists.
“It’s hard to overstate how transformative to cartooning Jules’s early work was,” Garry Trudeau, creator of Doonesbury, told the New York Times. “By stripping down the art to a sequence of elegant, repetitive images, he found a way to convey astonishingly sophisticated ideas without distraction.”
While Feiffer was not the first minimalist cartoonist — Peanuts, among others, preceded him — he can be found in the DNA of some of the best strips that followed him, from Doonesbury to Calvin and Hobbes, Bloom County, Cathy and Dilbert.
“I’d never seen anything remotely like it,” Trudeau told the Times, “and it set me and many others on a path toward a new kind of comics.”
As his frequent ventures into long-form writing would suggest, Feiffer didn’t limit all his stories to six or eight panels. Even the strip itself, which at one point was syndicated to a hundred newspapers around the country, had longer story arcs — notably that of Bernard Mergendeiler and The Dancer, the main recurring characters in his psychodramas.
Bernard grew less patient with the world over the years. The Dancer never lost her faith that there were reasons to keep dancing. While Jules Feiffer doubtless had his Bernard moments, in the end he too never stopped dancing.
