Jules Feiffer
From Philosopedia
Feiffer, Jules (26 Jan 1929 - )
Feiffer, born in the Bronx, New York City, started to draw at the age of six. His early favorites were "Flash Gordon," "Popeye," and "Terry and the Pirates." He studied at James Monroe High School and entered the Art Students' League. “I was desperate to be a cartoonist,” Feiffer once said.
From 1947 to 1951 he studied at the Pratt Institute while working as an assistant on Will Eisner's classical comic, "The Spirit," Feiffer later saying he presumed that the spirit was Jewish. Eisner abandoned it in 1952. In 1949 Feiffer created his first own comic feature, "Clifford," about a child who is accidentally drafted.
During his army time Feiffer made animated cartoons for the Signal Corps. After return to civilian life he worked in several jobs before Village Voice began in 1956 print his political cartoons with their uniquely neurotic characters. The weekly comic strip was simply called "Feiffer." A number of protagonists appeared in the strip, but among the best known is Bernard Mergendeiler, a victim-hero and psychological wreck devoured by tics and complexes, whom Feiffer depicted with the undertones of self-hatred and self-pity. Other characters are also more or less portrayed with black humor - 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.
A freethinker whose satirical cartoons in New York’s Village Voice starting in 1956 led to his climb to fame, Feiffer is one whose humanism shows in his concern about the breakdown of communication: between the state and the citizen, between black and white, between man and woman. His cartoons have appeared in numerous journals, including Playboy, New Yorker, the London Observer, and New Statesman and Society.
He received an Academy Award for Munro, an animated cartoon; a special George Polk Memorial Award in 1962; an Obie Award in 1969; the Outer Circle Drama Critics Award in 1969, 1970; and a Pulitzer for editorial cartooning in 1986.
He wrote Little Murders (1965), a play that involves black humor and was made into a film; Harry: the Rat With Women (1963), a novel; and the screenplay for Carnal Knowledge (1971) - the film, starring Jack Nicholson and Art Garfunkel, was banned in Georgia. 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). 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.
As political cartoonist Feiffer attacked unyieldingly, especially President Johnson's Vietnam politics and Richard Nixon, who was his most constant target. One strip showed President Johnson looking from his Oval Office while peace demonstrators are dragged away by the White House police. “Freedom of speech is one of out most precious liberties,” says the President. “Yes, Mr. President,” answers Dean Rusk. After Nixon's resignation subsequent satire of the Presidents became half-hearted in The Village Voice.
In 1986 Feiffer received the Pulitzer Prize in editorial cartooning. He is adjunct professor at Southampton College, and has taught at Yale and Northwestern.
“Christ died for our sins,” he has written. “Dare we make his martyrdom meaningless by not committing them?”
