Late cartoonist Jules Feiffer wrote plays and graphic novels, illustrated for children and wrote a screenplay that won him an Oscar. (AP)
Jan 27, 2025 07:15 IST First published on: Jan 27, 2025 at 07:10 IST
Jules Feiffer died in New York on January 17 at the age of 95, three days before Donald Trump was sworn in. He was a cartoonist eminently capable of taking on not just the new President but the kind of voters who elected him. That is not easy.
Cartoonists target power and go soft on the powerless. The public, including the reading public, has to be innocent. In the constitutional democracy where Feiffer functioned, cartoonists could offend the rulers and get away with it. But to question or unsettle readers is a tricky business in a career driven by readership.
It took another great cartoonist, O V Vijayan, to spell this out. In an interview in the 1990s, he said that adversarial art ceases to be so if it doesn’t take on all interests: “Work against even reader interests, when you have to.” Fan mail is welcome, he said, but if that’s all you are getting in your career, you’re no cartoonist.
One can’t fault Feiffer on this count. Given his background, he couldn’t have been any different. He was a natural nonconformist. Growing up in a Bronx Jewish family through the Great Depression and the McCarthyism that followed, he grew up out of sync with most things trending. Luckily for him and us, the crash of the economy and the hardening of politics coincided with the rise of American comic art. The doodler found his calling. Feiffer, still in his teens, persuaded his icon, Will Eisner, to try him out. Eisner was then producing The Spirit, a weekly comic insert for newspapers featuring a crime-fighting non-heroic sleuth. A stickler for graphic values, he didn’t care much for the boy’s drawing but was bowled over by his passion for comics. Feiffer was first assigned to erase and clean up artwork, and soon to do an independent comic strip. The happy apprenticeship was interrupted when he was drafted into the US Army.
More than the mentor’s studio, two years in uniform made Feiffer the cartoonist we know him as. At once a political creature who resented all forms of authority and an incisive seeker who left nothing unexamined. When he couldn’t oppose, interrogate or protest, he put his characters on the couch and analysed them to bring out the demons within.
Even before it was fashionable to mention the personal as political, Feiffer had seamlessly breached the border. After the Army relieved him, he broke into the booming American comics scene as a never-before-seen creator. Through 41 years as a staff cartoonist with The Village Voice from 1956, he did nothing to conform to the norms of his own art practice.
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He formatted his weekly strip into a borderless six-panel free-flowing sequence. There was no fixed cast of characters, the hardest thing to give up for a professional comic artist then. It was unthinkable at a time when even tame non-superpowered comic characters like Charlie Brown, Snoopy and Dennis were widely merchandised and syndicates and creators were raking in fortunes. This, however, didn’t limit his reach. He syndicated to as many as 100 publications worldwide, including our Shankar’s Weekly.
Feiffer wrote plays and graphic novels, illustrated for children and wrote a screenplay that won him an Oscar. A lesser cartoonist would have struggled with such distractions. He let it all flow into his satire. He featured recognisable personalities as much as unnamed private individuals. In the defiant 1960s and 1970s, he worked like an editorial cartoonist and a comic-strip artist rolled into one. His Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, Henry Kissinger and Ronald Reagan looked straight out of scathing news cartoons. So much so that the Pulitzer committee in 1986 picked this unconventional weekly sequential cartoonist for editorial cartooning.
The big-time stories of public policy randomly alternated with everyday accounts of anonymous men, women and children trying to cope. Readers didn’t know what to expect next from the “Feiffer” comic. The only familiar comfort was the squiggly anatomical drawing interspersed with blobs of hand-crafted text springing to life in a choreographed crescendo. The artwork got even more spirited whenever his favourite character appeared — the dancer who seemed to somehow retain faith against all odds. When in 2000, bored with George W Bush, Feiffer wound up his cartooning work with a farewell strip, she was there in the last borderless panel to disapprove of his exit. The feeling is shared.
