NS: Jules Feiffer, Pulitzer Prize Winning Cartoonist, Dead At 95

[cygnia]

https://comicbookclublive.com/2025/01/21/jules-feiffer-dies-age-95/

The Pulitzer Prize winning cartoonist Jules Feiffer has died at age 95.

Born January 26, 1929 in New York City, Feiffer got his start at age 17 as an assistant to another legend, Will Eisner, where he helped with iconic comics like The Spirit. However, his career really got a big bump up in 1956 when his strip Feiffer was first printed in the Village Voice, where it ran until 1997. Among other publications, Feiffer was published in the New York Times, where he pioneered the paper’s first op-ed comic strip.

Comments

[leahandillyana]

Great age to achieve. RIP to a legend!

[lego_joker]

For the "Humor is dead in this country" strip alone, I think he deserves to be at the very top of the pantheon.

A guy in the '50s - the '50s! - realized that only hacks complain about having to update their jokes because of changing social mores.

[michael_ellis_day]

Beyond his work as a cartoonist, it's impossible to overstate the importance of his 1965 book The Great Comic Book Heroes, the first actual book devoted to the history of superheroes in comics, with its semi-autobiographical text and copious full-color reprints of Golden Age stories. The text was very subjective and personal -- it wouldn't be mistaken for highbrow literary scholarship -- but for a young fan who had zero clue about the history of comics, that made it all the more effective. Not only was this a time before Internet blogs or social media, it was a time before any mass market books about comics, or even widespread reprints from Marvel and DC (apart from 25 cent Annuals). Five years later, Steranko came along with his History of Comics and Richard Lupoff and Don Thompson edited an anthology called All In Color For A Dime, and the floodgates of reprints and historical books were wide open. But Jules Feiffer was there first and everyone who followed owes him a debt. I daresay there's a direct line between what he did in that book and this very group we are in now.

[michael_ellis_day]

P.S.: Looking at this link brought back a lot of memories. Just imagine the way this big hardcover volume landed in a landscape with no comic book history books.

https://www.vaultofculture.com/vault/graphicnovels/greatcomicbookheroes

[cygnia]

My hometown library had a copy of "The Great Comic Book Heroes". I took it out a LOT.

[metadronos]

Feiffer was a singular talent. I remember his newspaper strip from when I was very young. Although I'm sure much of the humour flew above my head then, I do fondly remember a storyline in which a middle-aged man, tired of the stresses involved in being one, decides to regress to childhood mentally and physically, eventually persuading his wife to join him.

Also worth noting is that Feiffer ghost-wrote most of The Spirit stories from around 1950 to the strip's 1952 end.

[full_metal_ox]

I wonder if any of his juvenile homemade comics have been preserved:



(Note the 9-cent price: “Mine went for less because they weren’t real.”)

[rolzup]

Damn. His cartoons were great, and his children's books are fantastic. I've read _Bark, George!_ in more storytimes than I can remember, and it's always a hit.