Politics
Jules Feiffer, Pulitzer-winning cartoonist and writer known for lacerating wit, dies at 95
NEW YORK — Jules Feiffer, a Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist and writer whose prolific output ranged from a long-running comic strip to plays, screenplays and children’s books, died Friday. He was 95 and, true to his seemingly tireless form, published his last book just four months ago.
Feiffer’s wife, writer JZ Holden, said Tuesday that he died of congestive heart failure at their home in Richfield Springs, New York, and was surrounded by friends, the couple’s two cats and his recent artwork.
Holden said her husband had been ill for a couple of years, “but he was sharp and strong up until the very end. And funny.”
Artistically limber, Feiffer hopscotched among numerous forms of expression, chronicling the curiosity of childhood, urban angst and other societal currents. To each he brought a sharp wit and acute observations of the personal and political relations that defined his readers’ lives.
As Feiffer explained to the Chicago Tribune in 2002, his work dealt with “communication and the breakdown thereof, between men and women, parents and children, a government and its citizens, and the individual not dealing so well with authority.”
Feiffer won the United States’ most prominent awards in journalism and filmmaking, taking home a 1986 Pulitzer Prize for his cartoons and “Munro,” an animated short film he wrote, won a 1961 Academy Award. The Library of Congress held a retrospective of his work in 1996.
“My goal is to make people think, to make them feel and, along the way, to make them smile if not laugh,” Feiffer told the South Florida Sun Sentinel in 1998. “Humor seems to me one of the best ways of espousing ideas. It gets people to listen with their guard down.”
Feiffer was born on Jan. 26, 1929, in the Bronx. From childhood on, he loved to draw.
As a young man, he attended the Pratt Institute, an art and design college based in Brooklyn, and worked for Will Eisner, creator of the popular comic book character The Spirit. Feiffer drew his first comic strip, “Clifford,” from the late 1940s until he was drafted into the Army in 1951, according to a biography on his former website. He served two years in the Signal Corps, according to the online biography.
After the Army, he returned to drawing cartoons and found his way to a then-new alternative weekly newspaper, The Village Voice. His work debuted in the paper in 1956.
The Voice grew into a lodestar of downtown and liberal New York, and Feiffer became one of its fixtures. His strip, called simply “Feiffer,” ran there for more than 40 years.
The Voice was a fitting venue for Feiffer’s feisty liberal sensibilities, and a showcase for a strip acclaimed for its spidery style and skewering satire of a gallery of New York archetypes.
“It’s hard to remember what hypocrisy looked like before Jules Feiffer sketched it,” Todd Gitlin, who was then a New York University journalism and sociology professor, wrote in Newsday in 1997. Gitlin died in 2022.
Feiffer quit the Voice amid a salary dispute in 1997, sparking an outcry from readers. His strip continued to be syndicated until he ended it in 2000.
But if “Feiffer” was retired, Feiffer himself was not. He had long since developed a roster of side projects.
He published novels, starting in 1963 with “Harry the Rat with Women.” He started writing plays, spurred by a sense of sociological upheaval that, as he later told Time magazine, he felt he couldn’t address “in six panels of a cartoon.”
His first play, 1967’s “Little Murders,” went on to win an Obie Award, a leading honor for Off-Broadway and Off-Off-Broadway productions.
He ultimately wrote over a dozen plays and screenplays, ranging from the 1980 film version of the classic comic “Popeye” to the tougher territory of “Carnal Knowledge,” a story of two college friends and their toxic relationships with women over 20 years. Feiffer wrote the stage and screen versions of “Carnal Knowledge,” which was made into a 1971 movie directed by Mike Nichols and starring Jack Nicholson, Art Garfunkel, Candice Bergen and Ann-Margret. Feiffer also contributed to the long-running erotic musical revue “Oh! Calcutta!”
But after disappointing reviews of his 1990 play “Elliot Loves,” Feiffer looked to the gentler realm of children’s literature.
“My kind of theater was about confronting grown-ups with truths they didn’t want to hear. But it seemed to me we’ve reached the point, at this particular time, where grown-ups knew all the bad news. … So I hunted around for people I could give good news to, and it seemed to me it should be the next generation,” Feiffer told National Public Radio in 1995.
Having illustrated Norton Juster’s inventive 1961 book “The Phantom Tollbooth,” Feiffer brought a wry wonder to bear on his own books for young readers, starting with 1993’s “The Man in the Ceiling.” A musical version premiered in 2017 at the Bay Street Theater in Sag Harbor, New York.
The theater threw a surprise 90th birthday party for Feiffer in February 2019, when he did an on-stage interview to accompany a screening of “Carnal Knowledge.”
In recent years, Feiffer also painted watercolors of his signature figures and taught humor-writing courses at several colleges, among other projects. He published a graphic novel for young readers, “Amazing Grapes,” last September.
His wife said he had great fun writing it, relishing the drawings and story.
“He was,” she said, “a 5-year-old living in a 95-year-old’s body.”
Politics
It might take ‘a lightning bolt from God’ to get these Senate Democratic hopefuls to bow for independents
Democrats vying for a pair of deep-red Senate seats are facing increasingly desperate calls from within their party to step aside for more promising independent candidates.
But they say they won’t drop out — unless there’s divine intervention.
Democrats Alani Bankhead of Montana and Julian Beaudion of South Dakota both told Blue Light News they have no plans to exit the race, despite pressure from national — and even some state — Democrats to step aside. Numerouspolls, coupled with strongerfundraising and campaign operations, show independents Seth Bodnar and Brian Bengs have a stronger — if still muddied — path to victory in November.
If the Democrats stay on the ballot, it will be almost impossible to claw these seats away from Republicans in Mountain West states that President Donald Trump dominated in 2024.
“I’m a person of faith. If a lightning bolt from God struck me and was like, ‘Alani, get out of the race,’ sure,” Bankhead told Blue Light News when asked if anything would change her mind. Otherwise, she said there’s “absolutely nothing.”
Beaudion has a similar resolve: “To be clear, we are not considering dropping out of the race,” he told Blue Light News.
By digging in, the Democrats could imperil their party’s hopes of regaining Senate control in an already uphill cycle. There’s broad agreement across the many factions of the Democratic Party that a crowded race relinquishes any hope of victory. Bengs has argued that Beaudion remaining on the ballot jeopardizes his chance of winning this fall against GOP Sen. Mike Rounds. Bodnar has maintained he has a viable path either way, and he could be helped out if the Libertarian candidate in the race pulls votes from Republican Kurt Alme.
The deadline to withdraw in South Dakota is Tuesday, and Montana’s is shortly after, on Aug. 10. Democrats across the ideological spectrum in Washington and their home states are calling on Bankhead and Beaudion to step down to help their party bank-shot a Senate majority, with the idea that a victorious independent candidate could caucus with a future Democratic majority — or at least not party up with Republicans.
“The math is inescapable. If it’s impossible for a Democrat to win, it is vital that the Democrats step aside and give the independent at least a shot of beating the Republican,” said Matt Bennett, a co-founder of the centrist Democratic think tank Third Way. “Beating the MAGA Republicans is priorities one, two and three. Who we beat them with is pretty far down the list.”
Democrats have already had some luck setting up one-on-one independent vs. Republican matchups in other Trump-won states. The Democratic candidate in Nebraska withdrew to pave the way for independent Dan Osborn — though an ongoing court case from a Democratic anti-abortion pastor could complicate things. And Idaho’s Democratic nominee recently dropped out in favor of independent Todd Achilles.
“Knowing that your campaign is not gonna break through, and just being able to recognize that is probably the hardest thing of all,” Achilles said of Democrat David Roth’s decision to step down. “I do appreciate what David did in Idaho.”
Bankhead and Beaudion insist they can win, even despite the headwinds. Bankhead expects to ride the anti-incumbency and pro-outsider wave into office, and Beaudion credits his relationships with voters throughout the state.
“Nobody ever knows what’s actually going to happen in an election,” Bankhead said. “The people decide on November 3.”
But Idaho and Nebraska Democrats reached a conclusion that Bankhead and Beaudion did not: The party’s brand is so tarnished in their states that the “D” label on the ballot line provides no viable path to victory.
“I am a professional partisan Democrat, and I have every incentive to be on the Democrat’s side here,” said Pat Dennis, president of American Bridge 21st Century, an opposition-research firm. “But ultimately, the priority is to take the Senate majority away from Republicans. In some states, that path is very difficult to impossible for a Democrat. In those cases, it is both strategically and morally correct to take the path that is most likely to achieve the goal we’re going for.”
Faiz Shakir, a longtime adviser to Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), did not go as far as to call for Bankhead and Beaudion to step aside. But he agreed that there’s real opportunity for independents who aren’t stuck with the Democratic brand’s baggage.
“Being someone who’s not associated with the two-party system right now helps you greatly in many parts of this country, particularly those that have much more rural and conservative tendencies,” said Shakir. “There’s frustration and anger with Trump, and there’s not as much of a love and appreciation for the Democratic Party.”
Shakir also said that competitive races in these red areas — even if the independents can’t pull off a win — could force Republicans to pull much-needed resources out of battleground races in order to defend their turf.
But he also offered a warning to his party: Talking too much about the independents’ strong fundraising and establishment backing risks tying them to the “donor class” and turning them “into a worse version of what people assumed of a Democrat.”
“You gotta give them the space to be both independent in mind and in spirit,” he said. “The argument for them is truly that they are building a movement in the state that people are hungry for, and that in the support of those people, they’re finding resonance. And that would be the argument for a Democrat to step aside.”
Republicans, meanwhile, are working to paint the independents and Democrats as one and the same. They’re also trying to elevate the Democrats in an attempt to stop the independents from gaining more traction: Trump on social media attacked Bankhead in July, ignoring Bodnar entirely.
“Democrat-backed independents all support the same socialist policies and middle-class tax hikes that made Democrats toxic across the country,” Joanna Rodriguez, the communications director for the National Republican Senatorial Committee, said in a statement. “Republicans will defeat them in November.”
The inside calls for Beaudion and Bankhead to step aside aren’t just coming from Washington. Many local Democrats in Montana and South Dakota have said publicly they should not continue their campaigns. Nancy Keenan, the former executive director of the Montana Democratic Party who has endorsed Bodnar, wrote in a June op-ed that “there is not a viable path for a Democratic victory in this race.”
Bennett, the Third Way co-founder, went further, saying if Democrats fail to flip the Senate in November, the blame would lie at the hands of Bankhead and Beaudion.
“If we fumble away a majority because these no hope candidates are too vain to get out of the race, that’ll be a political calamity,” he said. “These people need to understand that they will become pariahs.”
Bankhead doesn’t see it that way.
“I’m not swayed by it because I’m not here for power and money,” she said. “It’s still the old, rich D.C. powerful political circles that are trying to keep more progressive candidates out of the fight so they can maintain the status quo.”
FCC chair Brendan Carr on Trump, free speech and his threats against broadcasters
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Former Lt. Gov. Mandela Barnes and his team are discussing dropping out of the crowded Democratic primary for Wisconsin governor, according to two people with direct knowledge of the matter.
The conversations come as Democratic officials in the state brace for damaging media reports about Barnes expected to hit in the coming hours. Barnes and his team have been on calls Thursday to discuss how to proceed, according to the people, granted anonymity to share private details.
The primary had become increasingly messy as more moderate leaning Democrats like Barnes have tried to stave off Democratic socialist Francesca Hong’s rise, worried her victory could boost presumed Republican nominee Tom Tiffany. Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers’ endorsement of David Crowley — who reentered the race in the final stretch — further complicated the moderate coalition.
A spokesperson for Barnes’ campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
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