Some artists draw every line as if they know just where it will end. Jules Feiffer never did. Not for him the delicate feathering, diligent crosshatching or obsessive pointillism of the neurotically controlling craftsman. His lines unfurled across the page like banners of the subconscious, zooming forward, doubling back and propelling the reader's gaze (and even, you had to suspect, his own) in directions nobody could have anticipated.
It wasn't just on the page that he hurled himself so intrepidly into the unknown. In life, too, he continually aimed for unseen horizons. When he died Jan. 17 of congestive heart failure at his home in Richfield Springs, N.Y., he left an abundant legacy across a range of artistic media. The history of graphic art, literature, film and the theater bear the imprint of his ever-distinctive, ever-wayward pen.
Fortunately, Feiffer wasn't one of those geniuses who were forced to languish unappreciated in his lifetime. He collected his share of kudos, though they took a while in coming. It wasn't until 1986 — rather tardily, you have to own — that he was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for editorial cartooning. Over the years, he received other journalism awards: a special George Polk Memorial Award, a Newspaper Guild Page One Award, an Overseas Press Club Award. In 1995 he was elected into the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and 2004 saw him inducted into the Will Eisner Comic Industry Awards' Hall of Fame. He wrote an animated short film, Munro, which won a 1961 Oscar.
What's more important, though, is the impact he had on a generation's inner eye. For people who knew the Village Voice as the coolest newspaper there was, treasuring characters like Munro, Huey and the Dancer as living companions, Feiffer was always more than a "mere" cartoonist.
Still, Feiffer's creativity was rooted in the medium. Born in the Bronx in 1929, he grew up loving to draw. At age 5, his depiction of Tom Mix snagged him a gold medal in the John Wanamaker department store's drawing contest. Straight out of high school, he looked up Will Eisner in the phone book and buttonholed the legendary comics mastermind in his downtown office. Eisner "couldn't have been more pleasant until he looked at my work, and then he told me that the work was s***," Feiffer told the Voice in 2018. Even so, Eisner allowed the boy to contribute bits and pieces to the studio's comics. Feiffer filled in black-ink areas and ruled panel borders. More importantly, he talked to Eisner about the form. Eventually Feiffer graduated to writing stories for The Spirit, continuing until he was drafted in 1951. He served in the U.S. Army Signal Corps until 1953.
After a period searching for his perfect outlet — or, at least, for anyone who would publish innovative work in the conformist mid-'50s — Feiffer saw his debut Village Voice cartoon printed in 1956, in the newspaper's first anniversary issue, and he quickly became known for his hyper-cool, icepick wit.
Real-life events prompted him to direct that wit into a more multidimensional medium: playwriting. In the early '60s he wrote the comedic revues The Explainers and Hold Me! and the one-act Crawling Arnold. The assassination of John F. Kennedy prompted him to pen his first full-fledged play, 1967's Little Murders. (Though its Broadway debut was a flop, an Off-Broadway production won an Obie award in 1969.) He went on to write The White House Murder Case in 1970 and Grown Ups in 1981, and two novels, Harry, the Rat with Women (1963) and Ackroyd (1977). Perhaps most memorably, he penned the screenplay for 1971's Carnal Knowledge, directed by Mike Nichols.
Meanwhile, back at the Voice, Feiffer still wasn't drawing a paycheck — and wouldn't for his first two decades there, even as collections like 1958's Sick, Sick, Sick and 1965's The Unexpurgated Memoirs of Bernard Mergendeiler made his style immediately recognizable across the country. Those collections introduced Feiffer to adult readers, but for the younger set he was the magical artist behind 1961's The Phantom Tollbooth. More than 30 years after illustrating Norton Juster's cult kids' book, Feiffer returned to the genre as an author, with books like 1993's The Man in the Ceiling (eventually adapted into a musical with Tony Award-winning producer Jeffrey Seller) and his 2010 re-teaming with Juster, The Odious Ogre. Recent years saw him return to razor-edged grownup satire in 2014's Kill My Mother and 2016's Cousin Joseph. His most recent book was a graphic novel for kids published in Sept. 2024, called Amazing Grapes.
Feiffer's ever-twisting creative path continued to surprise and inspire his fans throughout his life. In 2016 he embarked on yet another new chapter, marrying freelance writer and novelist JZ Holden. He was 87; she, 64.
In all his diverse endeavors, he taught us the joys of unpredictability, of stepping off the narrow road of convention. He was, and always will remain, the man who drew lines without knowing where they'd end.
Etelka Lehoczky has written about books for The Atlantic, The Los Angeles Review of Books and The New York Times.
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