The cartoonist and author Jules Feiffer, who has died aged 95, was the recording angel of postwar America’s angst: that last five-letter word being possibly the shortest in his vocabulary but entirely in character. As the US lay on the couch, Feiffer sat beside the patient, pencil and notebook in hand.
The artist’s surname itself came to denote a particular attitude to life, so in the end it was deemed sufficient to call his best-known strip Feiffer (it had started life as Sick Sick Sick).
The typical Feiffer character was an anguished, liberal New Yorker, possibly in analysis, certainly self-analytical and endlessly deluded: Woody Allen territory before Woody Allen. In the beginning was the Voice – the Village Voice, that is, in which Feiffer placed his first weekly strip in 1956 after several abortive attempts to find a publisher.
And from the beginning, Feiffer was to say later, his strip was a portrayal of Greenwich Village denizens “explaining themselves in an endless babble of self-interest, self-loathing, self-searching, and evasion”. Not just the denizens of Greenwich Village either: Richard Nixon was practically the archetypal Feiffer character – devious, lacking self-knowledge, crooked, paranoid, self-aggrandising. In the classic strip of his period of presidency, Tricky Dick was seen one week explaining: “When I do not tell the truth, it is not a lie. It is a protective reaction strike against pain.”
Jules was born in the Bronx, New York, to Jewish parents, Rhoda (nee Davis), a fashion designer who sold her drawings in Manhattan’s garment district at $3 a go, and David Feiffer, a salesman generally unemployed due to the Depression. Jules claimed that he was determined from a very early age to become a cartoonist, and later, in 1993, he was to publish a children’s book called The Man in the Ceiling, about a small boy whose ambition is to be a cartoonist.
For Feiffer himself, it was a feasible ambition: he was not a feeble draughtsman, though he did have trouble in the early days settling on a style. He started at the age of 16, doing storylines and layouts for a syndicated comic supplement run by Will Eisner that included Eisner’s creation the Spirit, a crime-fighting strip. Feiffer worked his way up to writing Spirit stories. When he asked for a rise in 1949 his boss refused but, to hold on to Feiffer, gave him the back page of the supplement for a strip of his own. This was Clifford, named after its principal character: a small boy who was constantly in trouble; he pre-dated Charlie Brown and Dennis the Menace by a couple of years. But in 1951, Feiffer was drafted into the army. He emerged two years later a political animal, with a healthy contempt for those “in abusive authority”.
His next strip, Munro, was also about a child, but this one was more socially aware than cute. It was made into an animated cartoon and won an Oscar in 1961. That year Norton Juster’s The Phantom Tollbooth, illustrated by Feiffer, was also published. It has since become a children’s classic, selling more than 5m copies.
His long association with the Village Voice lasted until 1997, by which time his Feiffer strip was widely syndicated. It appeared every Sunday in more than a hundred papers across the US and internationally (including in the Observer) and was the clearest voice raised against the hypocrisy and double-speak of government until Garry Trudeau’s Doonesbury came along. In 1986 his editorial work won him the Pulitzer prize.
Feiffer’s method was to work up a storyline first, then add the wispy drawings – and the figure in the drawing, often accompanied only by a monologue, is as much like the mind at work as it is a real person. It is no surprise, then, that Feiffer branched out into writing plays, such as Little Murders (1967), Knock Knock (1976) and Grown Ups (1981).
By the year 2000 Feiffer decided to throw the strip in for good to concentrate on his writing. He had written a couple of novels, as well as one of the earliest graphic novels, Tantrum (1977), and had just produced the children’s book Bark, George (1999).
In movies, as well as the acerbic script for Carnal Knowledge (1971), a sour tract that starred Jack Nicholson and Art Garfunkel as a couple of students growing up in an America without an inner core of belief, and Robert Altman’s Popeye, in 1980, his script for Alain Resnais’s film I Want to Go Home had won the 1989 Venice film festival award for best screenplay.
He continued to provide free-standing cartoons for Rolling Stone, the New Yorker and the New York Times, but the joys of working against a deadline had faded as he aged. In any case, as he said at the time, Al Gore and George W Bush were poverty-stricken material beside the riches provided by the eras of Lyndon B Johnson, Nixon and Ronald Reagan.
Feiffer stayed relevant with more graphic novels – Kill My Mother (2014), Cousin Joseph (2016) and The Ghost Script (2018). His autobiography, Backing into Forward: A Memoir, was published in 2010, and he adapted The Man in the Ceiling into a musical with Andrew Lippa, which opened in 2017. The following year Bernard and Huey, an indie film written by Feiffer and based on his comic strip characters, was released. He also taught at Columbia, Yale and Stony Brook Southampton.
Feiffer was married three times. The first two marriages, to Judith Sheftel in 1961 and Jennifer Allen in 1983, ended in divorce. He married JZ Holden, a writer, in 2016. She survives him, as do his daughter, Kate, from his first marriage, his two daughters, Halley and Julie, from his second, and two granddaughters.
• Jules Feiffer, cartoonist and writer, born 26 January 1929; died 17 January 2025
