Politics

Jules Feiffer, Pulitzer-winning cartoonist and writer known for lacerating wit, dies at 95

Published

1 year ago

January 22, 2025

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.”

Actor Jack Nicholson (left) visits with Bob Dishy (center) and Jules Feiffer following a performance of Feiffer's

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’s showtime for Trump’s revenge tour. Will he win?

Published

7 hours ago

May 5, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

President Donald Trump’s power as the GOP’s kingmaker faces a major test with this month’s primaries. So far, he’s on rocky footing.

His revenge tour kicks off Tuesday in Indiana, as he tries to oust eight Republican state legislators who blocked his redistricting effort there. Then it moves on to Louisiana and Kentucky, where he’s backing challengers to two longtime enemies, Sen. Bill Cassidy and Rep. Thomas Massie, who he’s been itching to unseat for years. Trump has also selected his favorite candidates in the crowded GOP primaries for Alabama Senate and Georgia governor.

But his picks have struggled to dominate their fields, with most holding only narrow leads in polling and some failing to pull far ahead in fundraising. In Indiana, even a few allies of the president are tempering expectations of a full eight-lawmaker sweep.

The results will reveal how effective the president’s political operation is at turning out Republicans when Trump is not on the ballot, and how motivated MAGA is to go along with his ongoing retribution campaign. It’s also a potent expression of his power ahead of the likely lame-duck phase of his presidency.

Some Republicans — even those involved in the races — say the shaky standing of Trump’s preferred candidates suggests that his ability to move his base en masse is beginning to slip. MAGA, they note, may be developing a mind of its own as the party begins to look beyond the Trump era.

“He’s hit his max power and now you’re seeing the backside of that power curve,” said former GOP Rep. Adam Kinzinger, a frequent target of Trump’s wrath who retired from Congress amid intense backlash for his 2021 vote to impeach the president and a new congressional map that would have left him in a member-on-member primary. “This will be his last competitive election cycle that will have any impact on him. And I think the base is starting to think into the future.”

Trump has a long history of unseating his congressional opponents, backing primary challengers to his critics and wielding his social media platform and his official bully pulpit to create such politically hostile conditions that many of his adversaries simply retire. Republican candidates have long jockeyed — and continue to trip over themselves — for his stamp of approval, hoping not to end up on the wrong side of his anger.

“The Trump endorsement is the most powerful and influential endorsement in the history of American politics,” said White House spokesperson Davis Ingle. “President Trump’s sterling record with his endorsements speaks for itself.”

Still, he’s produced a very mixed track record in contested races. Trump’s candidates have felled some of his biggest foes in GOP primaries, including former Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) and other Republicans who voted to impeach the president in his first term. But he’s also suffered some high-profile losses; he failed to oust Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp and has watched several of his picks fall short in congressional races over the years, including Sen. Luther Strange in Alabama and scandal-plagued Rep. Madison Cawthorn in North Carolina.

Success will be even trickier this cycle: The May contests come as he continues an unpopular war in Iran that’s causing voters pain at the gas pump, as people sour on his economic and immigration agenda and as his approval ratings continue to sink.

“The [Trump] endorsement just isn’t moving voters. It just isn’t,” said a GOP operative working on the Alabama Senate race who was granted anonymity to speak candidly. “When you’ve endorsed more than 800 people in 10 years, the potency of an individual endorsement wanes.”

May 5: Indiana

As the redistricting wars become a defining element of the midterms, Tuesday’s election will illuminate the president’s ability to maintain his grip on the Republican coalition.

While the White House and its allies have deployed the full force of its political operation against eight Indiana legislators — spending nearly $10 million across the races — they’re beginning to downplay the likelihood they will sweep all of them. Critics of the revenge effort say the strategy has been scattered and undisciplined.

How many incumbents survive will be an important piece of evidence predicting how the rest of May will go for the White House.

“We’ve tried to be helpful, as we always are, with our colleagues that are incumbents right now and will continue to be,” Rodric Bray, Indiana’s Senate President Pro Tempore who led the charge against Trump’s redistricting push, told Blue Light News. “The challenge, of course, is that money matters in politics. When $9 million is spent, that has a huge impact, and we’ll see what the result is.”

May 16: Louisiana

Trump-backed Rep. Julia Letlow is struggling to dominate the polls in her primary challenge to unseat Cassidy, who earned MAGA’s ire for voting to convict Trump on impeachment charges in 2021. The latest Emerson College poll shows Letlow locked in a close three-way race, with her at 27 percent, State Treasurer John Fleming at 28 percent and Cassidy at 21 percent. Nearly 1 in 4 likely GOP primary voters are undecided.

Letlow entered the race at Trump’s urging. She boasts endorsements from Louisiana’s GOP Gov. Jeff Landry and national groups like the Make America Healthy Again PAC, which has promised $1 million in support like distributing mailers — a needed financial boost given her middling war chest compared with Cassidy’s.

But Trump has not sent the calvary for Letlow, withholding his own war chest and not making any trips to Louisiana on her behalf. The president recently doubled down on his campaign against Cassidy, telling GOP primary voters to kick the incumbent “OUT OF OFFICE” — but Trump notably did not name-drop Letlow or urge voters to back her.

May 19: Kentucky, Alabama and Georgia

Trump faces two very different tests of his influence in Kentucky, where he is simultaneously boosting Rep. Andy Barr as retiring Sen. Mitch McConnell’s successor and pushing to oust a longtime thorn in his side in Massie.

The president waded in late for Barr, endorsing the representative less than three weeks before the primary while also offering one of his two rivals, businessman Nate Morris, a job in his administration — a move that could help propel Barr past former Kentucky Attorney General Daniel Cameron.

But it is Massie’s 4th District race that may prove more troublesome for Trump. The president finally fronted a challenger to the renegade Republican after Massie voted against the party’s signature tax-and-spending package last year, and Trump’s allies have now poured over $10 million into sinking the incumbent.

So far, Massie has withstood the onslaught. He leads his rival, former Navy SEAL Ed Gallrein, in polling, fundraising and name ID. One recent survey showed half of likely voters in his deep-red district with a libertarian bent preferred an independent-minded lawmaker, compared to 37 percent who wanted a strong Trump supporter.

Massie, who threads that needle by saying he’s with Trump “91 percent of the time,” argues that supporting him and the president aren’t “mutually exclusive things.” And he thinks the Trump-directed flood of outside money against him has its limits.

“If outside billionaires spend millions of dollars, they can change somebody’s profile,” Massie said in a recent interview. “But I think what they’re going to find out is that my brand is established well enough … that [they] can persuade some of the people, but they’re not going to be able to persuade enough of them.”

The president isn’t being driven by revenge in Alabama. But even there, his chosen candidate is battling to break through a crowded GOP primary field for Senate: The Trump-backed Rep. Barry Moore has a slight lead in public polling, while Attorney General Steve Marshall, who has been in office for nearly a decade, is holding his own.

Meanwhile in Georgia, Trump’s backing of Lt. Gov. Burt Jones’ gubernatorial run is a rebuke of Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, who rose to national prominence by defying the president’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election and is himself running for governor.

Still, Trump’s endorsement has its limits: Rick Jackson, a health care executive, has a slight lead over Jones in most polls for the GOP primary as he also makes a play for the MAGA base. He’s been pummelling the lieutenant governor with millions spent on attack ads.

“If any other candidate had received that amount of negative, they would be polling within the margin of error of zero,” said a Georgia-based Republican strategist who is unaffiliated with any candidate and was granted anonymity to speak openly. “When you’re looking at the reasons why [Jones] is now in a toss-up race, I would say the President’s endorsement is by far the top reason why.”

As both Jackson and Jones compete for the same slice of voters, some Republicans see Jones’ inability to dominate the race as evidence of Trump’s waning influence.

“It’s not just Donald Trump — Georgia candidates historically have not benefited very much from endorsements from out-of-state celebrities,” said Jason Shepherd, former Cobb County GOP Chair.

May 26: Texas run-off

After Sen. John Cornyn finished ahead of Attorney General Ken Paxton in Texas’ March primary, Republicans in Washington were on standby for Trump’s expected endorsement. It never came.

Perhaps in the clearest example of MAGA beginning to make decisions without Trump’s explicit approval, Texas Republicans have rallied around the scandal-plagued Paxton. Polling now shows that a Trump endorsement for Cornyn, at this point, likely wouldn’t sway voters significantly — and Paxton would maintain his edge.

GOP Texas consultant Vinny Minchillo that if Trump does decide to weigh in, he “will have to sell this to the faithful and tell them exactly what to do. Especially if he endorses Cornyn.”

Trump’s endorsement still matters, he said, but “less so with each day that passes.”