Jules Feiffer, a Pulitzer Prize winning cartoonist, has passed away at age 95.
“Jules might have been the first or second daring writer in American comic books. The Spirit stories he collaborated with Will Eisner on pushed the limits of the medium, in ways few were brave enough to try for decades later,” former DC Comics President and Publisher Paul Levitz posted on Facebook. “Jules was largely responsible for opening the eyes of my generation to the history of comics, and creating the category of comics history with The Great Comic Book Heroes. He was witness to the beginning, and shared the experience.”
Born January 26, 1929 in New York City, his art career began when he was just 17 years old. His first job in the industry was working as an assistant to Will Eisner where he helped the prolific creator on comics like The Spirit.
He started by cleaning up art then moved on to writing and finishing Eisner’s plots for The Spirit. Then he launched Clifford, his own comic, which ran from 1949 to 1951 in The Spirit. In 1956 he started his own strip, Sick Sick Sick in The Village Voice, which was later renamed Feiffer’s Fables then just Feiffer. Running for more than 40 years, Feiffer was nationally syndicated and collected in books by McGraw-Hill and Fantagraphics. The strip also appeared in The New Yorker, Los Angeles Times, London Observer, Esquire, and other publications.
Feiffer had a significant impact on the op-ed comic strips at the New York Times. His 1965 book, The Great Comic Book Heroes, was the first tome focused on the history of superheroes in comics. A tribute to Golden Age creators, the book covered the key period of the late 1930s to the early 1940s.
He won an Academy Award for the animated short film, Munro, in 1961, he won a Pulitzer Prize for editorial cartooning in 1986, and He was inducted into the Comic Book Hall of Fame in 2004.
Feiffer wrote the celebrated graphic novels Tantrum (his first, written in ’79), Cousin Joseph, The Ghost Script, and Amazing Grapes. One of his more recent works was the graphic novel, Kill My Mother, which was named a Vanity Fair Best Book in 2014 and nominated for an Eisner Award for Best Graphic Album-New.
In 1961, Feiffer began writing for theater and film, including the plays Little Murders, Feiffer’s People, and Knock Knock. He wrote the screenplay Carnal Knowledge, and the script for Popeye, which starred Robin Williams as the famous sailor.
In addition to his comics, Feiffer wrote over 35 publications as a novelist, non-fiction writer, autobiographer, playwright, and children’s book author. He has received many awards, including an Obie Award, Outer Circle Critics Award, George Polk Award, Lifetime Achievement Award from the Writers Guild of America, and Milton Caniff Lifetime Achievement Award from the National Cartoonists Society. He has also been inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
