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Jules Feiffer

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Jules Ralph Feiffer (born January 26, 1929) is an American cartoonist and author who was considered the most widely-read satirist in the country. He won the Pulitzer Prize in 1986 as North America's leading editorial cartoonist, and in 2004 he was inducted into the Comic Book Hall of Fame. He wrote the animated short Munro, which won an Academy Award for Best Animated Short Film in 1961. The Library of Congress has recognized his "remarkable legacy," from 1946 to the present, as a cartoonist, playwright, screenwriter, adult and children's book author, illustrator, and art instructor.

When Feiffer was 17 (in the mid-1940s), he became assistant to cartoonist Will Eisner. There he helped Eisner write and illustrate his comic strips, including The Spirit. In 1956 he became a staff cartoonist at The Village Voice, where he produced the weekly comic strip titled Feiffer until 1997. His cartoons became nationally syndicated in 1959 and then appeared regularly in publications, including the Los Angeles Times, the London Observer, The New Yorker, Playboy, Esquire, and The Nation. In 1997, he created the first op-ed page comic strip for the New York Times, which ran monthly until 2000.

He has written more than 35 books, plays, and screenplays. His first of many collections of satirical cartoons, Sick, Sick, Sick, was published in 1958, and his first novel, Harry, the Rat With Women, in 1963. He wrote The Great Comic Book Heroes in 1965: the first history of the comic-book superheroes of the late 1930s and early 1940s and a tribute to their creators. In 1979, Feiffer created his first graphic novel, Tantrum. By 1993, he began writing and illustrating books aimed at young readers, with several of them winning awards.

Feiffer began writing for the theater and film in 1961, with plays including Little Murders (1967), Feiffer's People (1969), and Knock Knock (1976). He wrote the screenplay for Carnal Knowledge (1971), directed by Mike Nichols, and Popeye (1980), directed by Robert Altman. Besides writing, he is currently an instructor with the MFA program at Stony Brook Southampton.

Feiffer was born in The Bronx, New York City, on January 26, 1929. His parents were David Feiffer and Rhoda (née Davis), and Feiffer was raised in a Jewish household with a younger and older sister. His father was usually unemployed in his work as a salesman due to the Depression. His mother was a fashion designer who made watercolor drawings of her designs which she sold to various clothing manufacturers in New York. "She'd go door to door selling her designs for $3," recalls Feiffer. The fact that she was the breadwinner, however, created an "atmosphere of silent blame" in the home. Feiffer began drawing at the age of 3. "My mother always encouraged me to draw," he says.

When he was 13, his mother gave him a drawing table for his bedroom. She also enrolled him in the Art Students League of New York to study anatomy. He graduated from James Monroe High School in 1947. He won a John Wanamaker Art Contest medal for a crayon drawing of the radio Western hero Tom Mix. He wrote in 1965 about his childhood:

I came to the field with a more serious intent than my opiate-minded contemporaries. While they, in those pre-super days, were eating up "Cosmo, Master of Disguise"; "Speed Saunders"; and "Bart Regan Spy," I was counting up how many panels there were to a page, how many pages there were to a story – learning how to form, for my own use, phrases like @X#?/; marking for future reference which comic book hero was swiped from which radio hero: Buck Marshall from Tom Mix; the Crimson Avenger from The Green Hornet ...

Feiffer says that cartoons were his first interest when young, "what I loved the most." He states that because he couldn't write well enough to be a writer or draw well enough to be an artist, he realized that the best way to succeed would be to combine his limited talents in each of those fields to create something unique. He read comic strips from various newspapers that his father might bring home and was mostly attracted to the way they told stories. "What I loved best about these comics was that they created a very personal world in which almost anything could take place," Feiffer says. "And readers would accept it even if it had nothing to do with any other kind of world. It was the fantasy world I loved."

Among his favorite cartoons were Our Boarding House, Alley Oop, and Wash Tubbs. He began to decipher features of different cartoonists, such as the sentimental naturalism of Abbie an' Slats, the [Preston] Sturges-like characters, and plots of others, with cadenced dialogue. He recalls that Will Eisner's Spirit rivaled them in structure. And no strip, except [Milton] Caniff's Terry [and the Pirates], rivaled it in the atmosphere."

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