Jules Feiffer, a ‘smartass’ Jew whose work spanned comics and cinema, dies at 95
The Pulitzer winner was working on a new book, and just moved upstate
Jules Feiffer, who dominated the world of comics, film and theater, died at 95. Image by Dick Demarisco
By PJ Grisar January 21, 2025
Jules Feiffer, the Pulitzer-winning polymath whose career spanned the fields of comic books, film, theater, has died. He was 95.
Feiffer was born in the Bronx on Jan. 26, 1929, to Jewish parents from Poland.
He told the Yiddish Book Center in an oral history that, as a child, he loved E.C. Segar’s Popeye and later the “adventure scripts” like Terry and the Pirates. But when he first read Will Eisner, he was bowled over by the grittiness of the subject matter and the angles he chose to tell stories.
Out of high school and in need of a job, Feiffer decided “amazingly, ’cause I had no courage at all,” to find him in the phone book. He went to his office on Wall Street, looked at his samples and, according to Feiffer, “told me how shitty my work was.”
But Feiffer deflected — changing the subject to Eisner and his work. He got the job.
Feiffer soon began “ghosting” for Eisner’s comic The Spirit. Eisner admired his flair for writing and ear for dialogue. It was also in his teen years that he encountered a type of Jewish identity that resonated with him.
“The antisemites made me a Jew. The Jews made me want to escape being a Jew — or the Jews I knew in the Bronx,” Feiffer said. Being in Manhattan he found “smartass, funny, wise guy” Jews. “It was only when I started hanging out in Manhattan that I realized it wasn’t so bad being a Jew, because I’m not the only Jew like this.”
Leaving the Eisner apprenticeship in the 1950s — he was drafted into the Army in 1951 and discharged in 1953 — Feiffer started a weekly comic for The Village Voice, then a new publication. His style, with its deceptively simple linework, and countercultural content, became a touchstone for the era — and was uniquely acerbic. He filleted the neuroses and narcissism of the age, but also the misrule of its leaders, showing, for instance, a young boy watching a series of consecutive presidents giving televised speeches on the war in Vietnam ending. The boy gets older until, at last, he’s in a flag-draped coffin.
He quipped that the Army made him a satirist. He was an unabashedly liberal one, friend to luminaries like James Baldwin, who introduced him to Maya Angelou. (Feiffer’s first wife, Judy, called Random House and suggested they have Angelou write a book for them — the result was I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings.)
One characteristic comic, which seems to have anticipated the term mansplaining — or the Me Generation — shows a couple at a restaurant. The man releases a flurry of “Me”s. When his date, a woman, responds with a solitary “I,” he yawns.
Feiffer often spoke of his Jewish mother, Rhoda, one to rival Sophie Portnoy. Of his burgeoning career as a cartoonist he once told the Forward she was at first supportive, but “when she learned what kind of cartoonist I became, she must have had serious thoughts about that, because the last thing my mother wanted was public notice because of controversy.”
“She was a U.S. citizen but she never took the citizenship as seriously as the ongoing persecution of the Jews wherever they happened to be or happened to hide,” Feiffer said. “So she knew that if I made a scene, she’d be shipped back to Poland. She didn’t think I would be shipped back — but she would be shipped back. So she wanted me to be a nice boy, and I was until I was drafted to join the Army. And then I wasn’t under my mother’s thumb. All hell broke loose from that point on.”
This “hell” was in fact acclaim, and it didn’t stay confined to panels for long. In the 1960s Feiffer illustrated Norton Juster’s The Phantom Tollbooth and began writing plays.
His 1967 work, Little Murders, debuted on Broadway. His best-known screenplay was Carnal Knowledge, directed by Mike Nichols, a friend and collaborator.
But even as he wrote screenplays for Robert Altman (Popeye) and Alain Resnais (I Want to Go Home), Feiffer never stopped drawing, producing a graphic memoir, Kill My Mother, and making an uncredited contribution to the films of Quentin Tarantino.
At a 2023 virtual appearance at the Jewish Comics Convention, Feiffer and others noted that Bill’s Superman monologue in Kill Bill Volume II was lifted from his 1965 book The Great Comic Book Heroes. (In conversation with comic writer and former president of DC Comics Paul Levitz, he said he “blew the cover on Superman and wrote about Siegel and Shuster’s hero being Jewish.”)
Last year, Feiffer published a graphic novel for young readers, Amazing Grapes, and spoke with The New York Times from his new home in upstate New York, an escape from the city — and his former home in Shelter Island — in which he spent so much of his life. He was at work on a new book called My License to Fail.
“It’s my way of paying back for all this beauty,” Feiffer said.
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