The Comic Strips of Jules Feiffer
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Jules Feiffer got his start in newspaper comics, though they were a strange sort of newspaper comics.
A young teenage Feiffer was hired by Will Eisner to work in the Eisner Studio as an assistant – erasing pencil lines, filling in spotted blacks, ruling borders, etc. The Grand Comics Database’s (GCD) first credit for Feiffer is as a colorist for The Spirit Section of May 18, 1947. But Jules also talked stories and plots with Eisner (on August 15, 1948 the GCD begins adding Jules’ name to the scripting credits, albeit with a question mark). After disrespecting some stories Eisner offered Feiffer the chance to write a story on his own.
Most sources put that initial Feiffer script for the September 11, 1949 The Spirit Section story “Ten Minutes.” But the GCD, working off credits from Cat Yronwode, Dave Schreiner, and Tom Heintjes’ articles in Kitchen Sink Spirit magazines, has Jules scripting a dozen Spirit stories before that and a half dozen co-scripting credits earlier. Jules wrote the majority of The Spirit stories from 1949 until the series ended on October 5, 1952 with a break in 1951 for U. S. Army basic training. The September 18, 1949 story (the week after that “Ten Minutes” story) found Jules sneaking his and letterer Abe Kanegson’s name into the story.
Feiffer is given one layout credit, but has said he laid a number of them as part of his plotting and scripting. He did get to draw part of a Spirit story, the December 31, 1950 chapter that guest-starred Clifford.
Clifford is a character Feiffer created for the last page of The Spirit Section. In lieu of the raise Jules asked for Eisner offered him exposure – a Sunday strip with his name on it. Clifford first appeared on July 10, 1949 and ran until July 27, 1952, but Feiffer only drew it until April 1, 1951 (April 8, 1951?) when the U. S. Army and basic training interrupted Jules’ comic career. With the April 15, 1951 issue Gene Bilbrew was given credit for the page.
Below Jules gets partial credit for the April 8, 1951 Clifford:
Was it Jules having fun? Maybe Feiffer script and layout and Bilbrew finishes? Maybe…?
Lambiek’s Comiclopedia says Jules wrote it to the end with Gene drawing. It also posits that Clifford was a prelude to Charles Schulz’s Peanuts:
Although ‘Clifford’ didn’t leave a lasting mark with readers, it is historically notable for debuting a year before Charles M. Schulz’s ‘Peanuts’ (1950-2000), a comic strip with which it shares thematic similarities. Although it is not known if Schulz had ever read ‘Clifford’, Will Eisner, in an interview by John Benson for Panels, stated that ‘Clifford’ was “a great feature that deserves to be recognized as the forerunner of Peanuts.” ‘Clifford’ was Feiffer’s first attempt to create comics about real-life people and their worries, a theme that became his trademark.
Anyway The Spirit ended in the Fall of 1952 and Feiffer bounced around doing animation and commercial projects until 1956 when he walked into The Village Voice offices and offered a weekly comic strip for free. The Voice took him up on that generous proposal.
On October 24, 1956 Jules Feiffer and The Village Voice began a forty year relationship with Feiffer showing up on page 3 every week. The Sick, Sick, Sick title lasted until January 21, 1959, it then went untitled through March 4, 1959. On March 11, 1959 the now familiar and eponymic Feiffer title was put over the comic strip. (In the late 1980s the “Feiffer” title was capitalized to “FEIFFER.”)
Soon after the strip began appearing Feiffer’s fame started to grow and the cartoonist has been credited with being one of the main reasons for The Village Voice’s success. On March 27, 1957 Feiffer’s famous dancer debuted and would reappear throughout the life of the strip.
After a few years the syndicates came knocking and Feiffer the comic strip and the cartoonist started appearing in newspapers around the nation. The Hall Syndicate began distributing the strip on the weekend of April 4/5, 1959.
For a time in the 1960s the syndicated feature was called Feiffer’s Fables by some.
Starting off more sociological than political those priorities were soon reversed, with the Nixon years bringing high acclaim, as those years did to other cartoonists. But it wasn’t until the Reagan presidency that Jules was award The Pulitzer Prize for his 1985 material.
Back to the late 1950s.
The Village Voice soon had no choice but to start paying Feiffer if they wanted to keep him. By mid-1958 Hugh Hefner had come calling on Jules and after an introductory article in the August Playboy Feiffer became a regular contributor of original material to Playboy with the September 1958 issue.
Hugh Hefner paid well for the full-page, often multi-page, comics for Playboy and Feiffer’s fame grew exponentially. If The Village Voice wanted to keep Jules, and they did, they would have to put him on salary, and they did.
Feiffer’s Playboy comics were mostly one-offs and increasingly features (multi-pagers) rather than single pages. Few continuing characters. One such was Hostileman, introduced in December 1964, but that character was part of a comic feature, not a one-pager. But Feiffer did return to Playboy in the April 1983 issue with Bernard and Huey, a monthly one page comic strip with continuing characters – characters that had been introduced in his weekly Feiffer strip.
I am unsure how long the Bernard and Huey comic strip ran in Playboy (at least through 1984).
The “return to Playboy” remark above relates to the increasingly popular Feiffer in the 1970s. He was contributing to other magazines and, of course, Hollywood. But during all that time he remained committed to his weekly Feiffer comic strip. Until 1997 when The Village Voice decided they would pay Jules a fraction of what he had been earning, Jules quit The Voice but continued Feiffer as a syndicated weekly comic strip (refusing to allow The Voice to run the syndicated version). The last Feiffer for The Village Voice ran in the June 3, 1997 cover dated issue.
The syndicated Feiffer continued.
And maybe a monthly strip special for The New York Times? Don’t know if those were, beyond the first one, original or if they were picked from the concurrent syndicated weeklies.
I do know that among the many contributions over the years to magazines like Rolling Stone, Esquire, The New Yorker, Saturday Evening Post, Ramparts, Commentary, The Nation, and others was a Hodgkins of State one time comic strip for The New York Times in 1981.
Feiffer the comic strip continued for three more years after leaving The Village Voice, at which time Jules’ screenplays, books, and other projects took up more of his valuable time.
And so Feiffer the cartoonist ended Feiffer the comic strip on June 18, 2000 with a four part farewell.
And that was the end of Jules’ print comic strips. But in 2018, for a year and a half, from October 8, 2018 to April 7, 2020 he created the twice monthly webcomic Jules Feiffer’s American Follies for Tablet.
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