Jules Feiffer, 1929-2025

What a talent. Period.

This isn’t a column about Jules Feiffer’s biography and accomplishments, although these are manifold. He’s the only person—ever—to win the Pulitzer, the Emmy, and the Oscar.

Imagine how talented you’d have to be to do that.

Jules finally won the Pulitzer in 1986, which was, as per Pulitzer Prize usual, about 25 years past when he should have won. His work was absolutely groundbreaking in the late 1950s and early 1960s when he was at the Village Voice, a publication that was too beatnik for the staid journalism burghers of that era.

For example, the 1960 Pulitzer Prize went to an unremarkable hack, Carey Orr, at the Chicago Tribune, instead of the great, and I mean great, Hugh Haynie of the Louisville Courier-Journal. Fortunately, his spiritual successor, Marc Murphy, is there now, minus salary and dental plan, but still.

Haynie led on civil rights, drew like an old master, and was one of the greatest editorial cartoonists of his era. If he had worked on The Washington Post in 1960, he would be far better-known than he is today.

Editorial cartoons back then featured the usual suspect symbols: Uncle Sam, elephants, donkeys, Mr. World, John Q. Taxpayer in the barrel, Mr. H-Bomb, Russian bears, weeping eagles. Frankly, you can still find a lot of this stuff in modern cartoons, but the good practitioners try to avoid these things as much as they can. I, for one, welcome our elephant and donkey overlords from time to time myself, but I generally don’t go there, mostly.

Jules?

Never. Ever, ever. Never.

No. He’d do a woman doing an interpretive dance to…whatever. He’d draw flag-draped coffins, precocious children way smarter than Peanuts characters, Manhattan neurotics, Lyndon Johnson, Bobby Kennedy, and the rest of the Vietnam War crowd speaking in he way only they can speak.

Feiffer’s dialogue writing was stunning.

Back then, no cartoonists really wrote dialogue like that. They drew pictures, and the vast majority of them not very well at that. Feiffer’s dialogue was so good he wrote screenplays, one for a movie called Carnal Knowledge, for which he won an Oscar. Back then, I was not permitted to watch Carnal Knowledge, but I watched it in my twenties and several lines still stick with me, and I will not repeat them here, for this is a family Substack.

Almost.

Cartoonists couldn’t imitate Jules, because he was sui generis. Some have noted a resemblance to Doonesbury’s work and the work of Jules, but that’s OK. Young artists do that.

I knew Jules in passing, and one of the things I would often repeat to myself later was “Jules Feiffer knows who I am,” and I can insert fifty other artist’s names and get the same holy shit sensation—but it was marvelous to me that I was acquainted with him.

Jules was quite friendly and accessible. One time he came to Portland to do a book signing at Powell’s Books, and he generously invited me, my wife, and my kids out to a Mexican restaurant for lunch. That restaurant is across the street from where one of my sons works, and I still smile at the memory. He also signed books to my kids, who had no idea who he was. I never heard anything other than the same reports from my younger colleagues: Jules was nice to me!

I later would call him, but only if I had a very specific question. In 2015, I invited him to Columbus to present at the AAEC convention, to be interviewed by me and one of my other I cannot believe I am friends with him friend Jeff Danziger. This was right after the Charlie Hebdo massacre, and that gathering featured Columbus SWAT teams protecting our group. There were probably ten police officers floating around THE Ohio State University auditorium then.

Jules was in his mid-eighties by then, and cancelled his flight at the very last minute, so Jeff and I did a remote video interview with him. Just to call him “Jules” seemed surreal and pretentious to me, some suburban schmuck from Arden Hills, Minnesota.

In the early 1990s, when I was in my early thirties, Jeff once had a cocktail party at his two-story apartment in Hell’s Kitchen, and every major New York cartoonist seemed to be there. Ed Sorel was present, and he closely questioned me about where, precisely, I had obtained a piece of art he had done for The Nation as if I had broken into his apartment to get it (I didn’t, I traded for it). Barry Blitt was there, Mark Alan Stamaty was there, as well as a few of my colleagues, including Rex Babin, Joel Pett, Matt Davies, Frank Cammuso, Henry Payne, and, drum roll, Jules Feiffer, along with his second wife.

This was the coolest I have ever felt, before or since.

I am at a party with Jules Feiffer, and he was nice to me!

As Jules drifted into his nineties, he kept all of his marbles, published books, and moved to the more sedate Cooperstown, New York, away from Long Island. I’m told he enjoyed it there, but it was about three or four hours from Manhattan, which cut into the visits from his older pals. I learned yesterday that Jules, Sorel, and the astoundingly talented and wonderful Arnold Roth were born within three months of each other in Brooklyn.

Arnold Roth is one of the nicest people I have ever met or known, and so is his wife Caroline. In fact, Arnie is the oldest living pack-a-day smoker I have ever encountered. He’s even appeared on the Tonight Show—with Johnny.

I wish I had the brass to know Jules a bit better, along with a lot of other artists who are gone now. I’m extroverted, but I am also from Minnesota. I cherish my friendships in our community, and it’s the best thing about doing what I do—period.

May Jules’ memory be a blessing—and I will ponder his work for as long as I am here, and well as keeping up with the dear friends in the business I have now.

An interpretive dance to Jules is in order.

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Hey, Friends of You Betcha!: If you have someone in your life like Jules, reach out. That’s my life lesson for the day. —J.