Jules Feiffer honored with 2012 John Fischetti Lifetime Achievement Award

Columbia College Chicago has announced that Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial cartoonist Jules Feiffer is the 2012 recipient of the John Fischetti Lifetime Achievement Award. The Fischetti Lifetime Achievement Award honors an outstanding career of editorial cartooning, work skewering cultural mores, misguided public policies and self-important people.

Feiffer is a cartoonist, playwright, screenwriter and children’s book author and illustrator. Feiffer has created a career turning contemporary urban anxiety into witty and revealing social commentary. His most famous strip, “Feiffer,” for which he won a Pulitzer Prize for political cartoons in 1986, ran for 42 years in the Village Voice. Feiffer’s cartoons can be also seen in The Los Angeles Times, The New Yorker, Esquire, Playboy and The Nation.

“It’s the rare person who can combine art and satire in a deftly drawn cartoon,” said Nancy Day, chair of the Journalism Department at Columbia College Chicago, which coordinates the competition and the event. “Jules Feiffer has excelled in many media. We are so pleased to honor him with this award in memory of John Fischetti.”

Feiffer became interested in cartooning early in life and, at the age of 16, became an assistant to writer-artist Will Eisner, who gave Feiffer his own page in Eisner’s weekly syndicated comic insert. Feiffer’s first comic, “Clifford” ran from 1949-1951. In 1997 he was commissioned by The New York Times to create the first comic strips for its Op-Ed page. Besides his cartoons and the anthologies of this work, Feiffer has created more than 35 books, plays and screenplays.

In addition to the Pulitzer, Feiffer has received other accolades for his work, including the George Polk Award, the National Cartoonists Society’s Milton Caniff Lifetime Achievement Award and induction into the Comic Book Hall of Fame. He received the Creativity Foundation’s Laureate in 2006 and won a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Writers Guild of America.

Feiffer will receive his award on April 5 at the 30th anniversary celebration of the John Fischetti Editorial Cartoon Competition. Dick Locher, who won the first Fischetti Lifetime Achievement Award last year, will present Feiffer’s award. Locher is also a Pulitzer winner who drew editorial cartoons and the comic strip “Dick Tracy,” and the two men knew each other decades ago in New York, where Feiffer lives.

The evening will also honor this year’s recipient of the editorial cartoon competition, as well as the Fischetti scholarship winners.