In October 1956, Mr. Feiffer strolled into the office of The Village Voice, which had been founded the previous year, and offered to draw a regular strip for nothing. First titled “Sick, Sick, Sick,” it eventually became “Feiffer.” (He was not paid, he later wrote, until 1964.)
…
“It’s hard to overstate how transformative to cartooning Jules’s early work was,” Garry Trudeau, creator of the comic strip “Doonesbury,” wrote in an email. “By stripping down the art to a sequence of elegant, repetitive images, he found a way to convey astonishingly sophisticated ideas without distraction. No balloons, no screens, no backgrounds, no panels, just simple line drawings and the flow of bright, witty dialogue.”
…
When Mr. Feiffer was interviewed by Mr. Simon in 2024, the occasion was the publication of “Amazing Grapes,” his first graphic novel for middle-school-age children.
“Are you on to the next project already?” Mr. Simon asked the indefatigable Mr. Feiffer, who had turned 95 that year. “Of course,” he replied. “What a foolish question. Of course.”
An incredible career. And an incredibly influential one.
Several of Feiffer’s cartoons were published as standard-size paperbacks in the 1950s (in addition to the later oversized reprints of strips). He also contributed to theater. His comic story Passionella became part of the show The Apple Tree, pretty much simply translating his drawings and dialogue into a script. But he later wrote shows directly, like Knock! Knock!
His story Munro, about a four year old boy who gets drafted into the Army (the officers won’t believe that he’s four, because all the forms were properly followed), was made into an Oscar-winning animated short in 1960
Although I love Feiffer’s work, and am grateful for his contributions to the history of comics, I do have to complain about some of it. His book The Great Comic Book Heroes has abysmal examples of the art in it. The examples he should have chosen should have been ones typical of the art and of that character. But the examples from Will Eisner’s The Spirit are mediocre at best. The example of the “splash page” from The Spirit is downright awful. All of that is ironic, considering that Eisner really gave Feiffer his first break in comics. Eisner’s “Spirit” was the embodiment of good comic drawing, and his splash panels just oozed drama and mood. The examples Feiffer used are stiff and unimaginative. They don’t even look as if Eisner drew them.
And the same criticism holds for the rest of the book.
Feiffer also famously wrote the script for the movie musical Popeye – the one starring Robin Williams. While it’s true that producer Robert Evans insisted that “insisted that the screenplay reflect the comic-strip Popeye, and not the “distorted” cartoon version”. But Feiffer, who cited the strip by E.C. Segar as one of his prime influences, may have felt the same way about it. The problem is, of course, that most people only know Popeye from those “distorted” cartoons. A good script would have found some way to pay proper tribute to both. But Feiffer’s script leaned too far towards the strip version, even going so far as to have Popeye say he “hated spinach”, something the Mad magazine parody picked up and stomped on. How could an audience raised on the cartoons with its spinach-eating hero relate? Not to mention all the time spent on characters and situations they would have been utterly unfamiliar with? Even Feiffer decried the overuse of minor characters). The film was a flop, in no small part because of the script
Couldn’t tell you, but the story was part of Feiffer’s People, a play I performed in in college.
The protagonist eventually agrees to compete in the Olympics, but each time the Russian athlete hurls an object for a great distance, he matches the feat exactly. When accused of not trying his best, he responds that it’s more difficult to throw [the object] that specific distance on purpose than to throw it farther.
Juster loved to mess with Feiffer. In the list of demons in the end, there are the “Triple Demons of Compromise”, described as “one short and fat, one tall and thin, and one exactly like the other two”. Juster did this just to describe something impossible for Feiffer to draw.
