Jules Feiffer - Biography

Biography

Raised in The Bronx, New York City, New York, where he graduated from James Monroe High School in 1947, Jules Feiffer won a John Wanamaker Art Contest medal for a crayon drawing of the radio Western hero Tom Mix. Interested in an early age at cartooning, he wrote in 1965 about his childhood:

I came to the field with a more serious intent than my opiate-minded contemporaries. While they, in those pre-super days, were eating up "Cosmo, Master of Disguise"; "Speed Saunders"; and "Bart Regan Spy", I was counting up how many panels there were to a page, how many pages there were to a story – learning how to form, for my own use, phrases like: @X#?/; marking for future reference which comic book hero was swiped from which radio hero: Buck Marshall from Tom Mix; the Crimson Avenger from The Green Hornet...

He read comic strips in the New York World-Telegram newspaper that his father brought home, including Our Boarding House, Alley Oop "and my favorite at the time, Wash Tubbs, with the 'soldier of fortune' hero, Captain Easy". When his father switched to the evening edition of the New York Post, Feiffer absorbed other strips, including Dixie Dugan, The Bungle Family, Nancy (then titled Fritzi Ritz), "and that masterpiece of sentimental naturalism, Abbie an' Slats. I studied that strip – its Sturges-like characters, its Saroyanesque plots, its uniquely cadenced dialogue. No strip other than Will Eisner's Spirit rivaled its structure. No strip, except Caniff's Terry , rivaled it in atmosphere."

At age 16, Feiffer began as an assistant to writer-artist Eisner, whose comic strip The Spirit appeared in a seven-page insert in Sunday newspaper comics sections. As Eisner recalled in 1978:

Feiffer walked into my studio after . I had an office on Wall Street, as I recall. I forget the year it was, but it couldn't have been earlier than '46 or '47. Feiffer walked in and asked me for a job and said he'd work at any price, which immediately attracted me. He began working as just a studio man – he would do erasing, cleanup... Gradually it became very clear that he could write better than he could draw and preferred it, indeed – so he wound up doing balloons . First he was doing balloons based on stories that I'd create. I would start a story off and say, 'Now here I want the Spirit to do the following things – you do the balloons, Jules.' Gradually, he would take over and do stories entirely on his own, generally based on ideas we'd talked about. I'd come in generally with the first page, then he would pick it up and carry it from there.

Before this, in 1947, when Feiffer asked for a raise, Eisner instead gave him his own page in The Spirit section, where the 18-year-old Feiffer wrote and drew his first comic strip, Clifford (1949–51), published in six newspapers.

Feiffer's strips ran for 42 years in The Village Voice, first under the title Sick Sick Sick, briefly as Feiffer's Fables and finally as simply Feiffer. Initially influenced by UPA and William Steig, the strip debuted October 24, 1956, and 14 months later, Feiffer had a bestseller when McGraw-Hill collected the Village Voice strips as Sick Sick Sick: A Guide to Non-Confident Living (published January 1, 1958). Beginning April 1959, Feiffer was distributed nationally by the Hall Syndicate, initially in The Boston Globe, Minneapolis Star Tribune, Newark Star-Ledger and Long Island Press.

His strips, cartoons and illustrations have also appeared in the Los Angeles Times, The New Yorker, Esquire, Playboy and The Nation. He was commissioned in 1997 by The New York Times to create its first op-ed page comic strip, which ran monthly until 2000. He was married twice and has three children. His daughter Halley Feiffer is an actress and playwright.