It was announced that Jules Feiffer passed away on January 17th 2025. His great career spanned over 70 years and he will be remembered for being one of America's most insightful cartoonists and satirists. He worked under legendary cartoonist Will Eisner, illustrated numerous literary works such as The Phantom Tollbooth, was a staff cartoonist for the Village Voice and was even a Hollywood screenwriter for Mike Nichols' Carnal Knowledge as well as Robert Altman's film adaptation of Popeye.
Feiffer had a great sense of cartoon design that conveyed much about a character with very simple and clear line. World renown drawing instructor, Glenn Vilppu has referred to Fieffer's use of line in his lectures on more than one occasion.
Feiffer's contribution to the American Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s truly deserves to be noted.
Feiffer was quoted in the August 25, 2014 issue of Comics Journal, " That [The Vietnam War] and the civil rights revolution were basically the two political acts that essentially defined my career as a political cartoonist.
Civil rights leader, and advisor to the Congress of Racial Equality, CORE, Bayard Rustin said the Jules Feiffer was a pioneer in defining the "white liberal".
In 1966 the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith published a collection of Feiffer's civil rights themed cartoons into a book titled, "Feiffer on Civil Rights". Inside Feiffer takes aim at not just the brutish ignorant white racist, but also the casually racist white liberal who also suffers from a type of ignorance. Blacks who wear their identity like a costume in order to be accepted, or blacks who use civil rights as a money hustle are also pointed out.
Feiffer, a self-proclaimed liberal, seemed to be capable of a very important quality: self-criticism and the ability to humorously point out his side's own hypocrisies. Not just pointing the finger at the ones you disagree with but also yourself. A trait that seems to be lacking in liberals today, as well as conservatives. This might be part of the reason for the current generations' hyper-reactivity to the slightest form of criticism.
"Civil rights used to be so much more tolerable before Negroes got into it." , a very insightful punchline from a Feiffer cartoon. Pointing one of the greatest stereotypical white liberal hypocrisies: Expressing moral vanity about blacks without ever having to actually live with them as your equal.
My mother Doris Funnye Innis, editor of the Congress of Racial Equality publication, Rights and Reviews corresponded with Jules Feiffer in 1966 and persuaded him to contribute one of his political cartoons to the civil rights organization. The cartoon satirized the sordid symbotic relationship between the Black Power movement and the forces of white supremacy. Like a destructive Yin and Yang, one always enabling the other.
Jules Feiffer was a not a good but a great white liberal in that, he expressed himself in his work earnestly as possible, pointed out the faults of those he felt opposed to without savagery, and being fully honest about where his side is falling short.
Feiffer roasted human nature itself. A fault in our character we all share.
