Jules Feiffer (1929-2025)

Did he know how much, and in how many ways, his life touched others?

It’s hard to describe what it was like as a young teenager in New York, spending time in Manhattan on my own for the first time, to pick up a copy of The Village Voice. The entire newspaper was strange and mysterious — nothing like the newspapers my parents read: The New York Times, The Long Island Press, and The New York Post (when it was an afternoon liberal paper). But nothing was more bizarre and enchanting than the comics? cartoons? graphic op-ed pieces? inked by Jules Feiffer, who died last week.

Feiffer did many things besides the strip.

Around age 9, I got The Phantom Tollbooth as a Christmas gift. I took one look at the cover, a weird drawing of a dog and a boy, and put it aside. At the time, I rejected anything that seemed like it was for kids. I wasn’t about to be condescended to. A year or so later, with nothing else in the house to read, it instantly became one of my two favorite books. (The other was David and the Phoenix.) I wasn’t smart enough, later on, to recognize the same illustration style in the Villiage Voice cartoons.

After my parents were divorced, my father would take me along to movies he wanted to see at an art house movie theatre near us )the Earle, in Jackson Heights). I remember going with him to “King of Hearts,” “Putney Swope,” and “Little Murders,” which Feiffer wrote. I didn’t think much of it; it depicted a New York City at its clichéd worst — crime, garbage everywhere, futility. (Donald Trump must have seen it too; it’s the impression of his own city he still carries around with him.)

As you can see, the Earle became a porn theatre, before closing entirely. The neighborhood movie houses of my youth are all gone now — the Earle, the Jackson, the Colony, and the Boulevard, which was trisected before eventually shuttering.

“Carnal Knowledge,” also written by Feiffer, could have been one of those movies, but I saw it with my friend Joel. He and I would go into Manhattan to the twin movie theatres by Bloomingdales, the Baronet and Coronet. It was only one of many movies we saw there without being old enough to clear the age-ratings bar. We would wait until we saw someone buying a ticket alone, intercept him (it was always a him) on the way to the ticket booth, proffer our money, and ask if he would buy two additional tickets. This film’s depiction of ennui was more personal, deeper, and sophisticated. I loved it.

But Feiffer for me is first and foremost woven into my thoughts of the news weekly he worked for. I can’t do a better job of explaining how important The Village Voice was in the 1970s than the radio show On the Media has done in its episode, “How The Village Voice Changed Journalism.” I can only explain how it changed journalism for me. How it changed New York for me. How it, more than almost any other influence, aided my passage into adulthood. I got jobs and apartments from the classifieds. I got dates from the personal ads. I got my first sense of state and local politics, first-amendment law, dance, and theatre.

Notice the newspapers, held down by metal bars as paperweights, keeping the pages from flapping in the wind. Not every newsstand was sophisticated enough to carry the Voice, and it would eventually be a free paper with its own plastic kiosks dotting Manhattan streets, but that was later.

The Village Voice shamed the NY Times into taking off-off-Broadway seriously. For me, that was personal: My aunt and uncle founded Theatre for the New City, which in its 60 years has won dozens of Obies — an award the VV invented. (As a teenager and young adult, I was in several shows, though none won an Obie.)

I feel like I can remember seeing a Feiffer cartoon for the first time. It made no sense to a faithful reader of DC Comics, for whom even Marvel comic books were weird. Feiffer’s panels had no borders. The words had no balloons. There were no superheroes, kids, or animals. Just a person or two who might as well have been my parents. Talking. Sometimes dancing.

I slowly deciphered Feiffer, as I deciphered the politics I was reading about, the art scenes, the music trends — the New York I was growing into.

The Voice had its own newsstand paperweights. I once asked a newsstand owner if I could buy one. I think I gave him $3 for it. That was probably in the late 1970s. Here it is on my desk — I’m not sure I still own anything else that goes back that far.

I welcome your comments (here or on Bluesky), forwards, follows, and restacks.