Jules Feiffer, acerbic cartoonist, writer and many others, dies at 95

Jules Feiffer, an artist whose creative instincts and political passions could not be limited to a single medium, died Friday at his home in Richfield Springs, New York, west of Albany. He was 95 years old.

His wife, JZ Holden, said the cause was congestive heart failure.

Mr. Feiffer was known primarily as a cartoonist. His black-and-white comic strip, “Feiffer,” which astringently expressed the cynical, neurotic, aggrieved and ardently left-wing sensibilities of postwar Greenwich Village, debuted in The Village Voice in 1956 and ran for more than 40 years. But his career also extends to novels, plays, screenplays, animations and children’s books.

A recurring element in much of his work was his acerbic view of human nature.

As a screenwriter, Mr. Feiffer collaborated with French filmmaker Alain Resnais (on the 1989 film “I Want to Go Home”) and American directors Robert Altman (“Popeye”) and Mike Nichols (“Carnal Knowledge”). . As a creator of children’s books, he helped produce the acclaimed classic, “The Phantom Tollbooth,” for which his illustrations accompanied the words of Norton Juster. Her art has appeared in magazines and in gallery and museum exhibitions, and even inspired a modern dance piece.

Jules Ralph Feiffer was born on January 26, 1929, in the Bronx, to David Feiffer, an unsuccessful men’s store entrepreneur, and Rhoda (Davis) Feiffer, who sold dress designs and largely supported their family. , which included Jules’ two sisters, Mimi. and Alice.

As a child in the 1930s, Jules loved radio dramas and newspaper comic strips. In his 2010 memoir, “Backing Into Forward,” he cited as influences cartoonists EC Segar (“Thimble Theater,” the comic strip that introduced Popeye), Al Capp (“Li’l Abner”) and Milton Caniff ( “Terry and the Pirates”), among others. He embraced early comic books, which were comic anthologies, and, after Superman’s debut in 1938, superhero comics as well.