Birthday: "Getting out of bed in the morning is an act of false confidence."

Jules Feiffer (1929-  )
Cartoonist, author, playwright


A born doodler, that Jules. He won a department store art contest as a kid, with a crayon rendering of the cowboy movie star Tom Mix. His mother put him in some art school classes as a teen; at 17 he cold-called Will Eisner (1917-2005) one of the stars of the golden age of comics and, later, an inventor of the graphic novel. 

Feiffer offered to do anything, just to work for a cartoonist. Eisner wasn’t sure Feiffer was skilled enough to do anything useful. In the end, Eisner made a job for the boy. “He hired me because I knew more about him than anybody in the world. So he was forced to hire me as a groupie.”

The two worked together for a decade. In 1956 Feiffer joined the New York alt-weekly, The Village Voice, and spent forty years there. His fluid style, which skipped the traditional boxed drawings format to propel narrative, emphasized movement, and motion, in and between a series of freestanding sketches. By 1959 he was nationally syndicated; in 1961 he won an Oscar for Best Animated Short Feature.

He wrote half a dozen plays, winning an Obie for Little Murders in 1971. Mike Nichols adapted another, Carnal Knowledge, into an award-winning film in 1971. Feiffer, trying his own hand at Hollywood work, adapted Little Murders into a movie, and wrote the screenplay for Robert Altman’s Popeye.

Feiffer won a Pulitzer Prize for Editorial Cartooning in 1986, and was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1986. In 2010 he published an illustrated memoir, Backing Into Forward.

Had he done nothing else, Jules Feiffer earned his place in history, and the hearts of readers forever, when he illustrated his neighbor Norton Juster’s book, The Phantom Tollbooth, in 1961.

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