Jules Feiffer, the Pulitzer-prize winning cartoonist, playwright, author and screenwriter, whose satirical wit and illustrations were for a time the voice of the Village Voice died on Jan. 17.
How do Jules Feiffer’s early comic strips hold up after half a century? For over 40 years, beginning in 1956, his provocative, often ironic cartoons appeared weekly in the Village Voice. Fantagraphics Books has just published Explainers ($28.99 hardcover), a complete collection of the first 10 years’ worth, from 1956 to 1966. The strips deal with politics and the battle of the sexes in an era when intellectuals obsessed about Marx and Freud and when humor might arise from observing hypocrisy in people’s politics and their intimate relationships.
Like an elongated dancer in one of his drawings, lanky Jules Feiffer loped in, stretched out his fingers and curtseyed to the standing ovation that greeted his arrival on the Broadway stage last Monday night. Knees bent, he cocked his head and lifted his eyebrows, simultaneously sheepish and soaking it all up.
As soon as the applause died, of course, he stuffed his hands in his suit pockets, shuffled off to the side and muttered into his microphone a warning to himself not to take a pratfall off the stage.
On Monday, Nov. 15, the Writer’s Guild of America, East Foundation will host a benefit performance of Jules Feiffer: Funny Side Up at the Samuel J. Friedman Theatre, 261 West 47th street, at 8 p.m.
BACKING INTO FORWARD. By Jules Feiffer. Nan. A. Talese / Doubleday, 2010. 464 pages, photographs. $30 hardcover.
Jules Feiffer is one of our icons in the hall of fame that includes Mike Wallace, Beverly Sills, Bill Styron and Walter Cronkite. Island icons are colossi in the big wide world, and brand-makers of the Vineyard as a place that harbors the rich and famous and give-backers to the community. The billionaires who build bulgy houses come and go.
No good deed ever goes unpunished. And so, as Jules Feiffer told an overflow audience at the Katharine Cornell Theatre last Saturday night, after he wrote the screenplay for the 1971 film Carnal Knowledge, his Hollywood career stalled for a decade or more.
Mr. Feiffer knew he was in trouble even before the movie came out. He recalled a couple of the comments made by the Hollywood heavy-hitter directors after they had seen a preview screening.
