Jules Feiffer was many things for many different audiences throughout his lengthy career. To many, he was a cartoonist for the Village Voice, a position he held for more than four decades after stepping into the role in 1956 (His weekly strip, simply titled Feiffer, was retired in 1997.) He was, additionally, a playwright, a comic industry historian, an award-winning children’s book author, and a teacher. Throughout it all, his work inspired and touched countless people, and for many, redefined their ideas of what cartooning, comic books, and simply just art is capable of.

Earlier this week, Jules Feiffer's family announced that he died on January 17, 2025.

Feiffer’s career started early; he was just 16 when he went to work in the studio of one of the finest comic creators of all time, Will Eisner. Amusingly, Eisner wasn’t that impressed by Feiffer’s artistic chops, but reportedly appreciated “the kid’s spunk and intensity,” and brought him on at first to do simple odd jobs before eventually becoming a fully-fledged collaborator with Eisner on the final days of the world-famous newspaper strip The Spirit. (By the end of the strip, Feiffer was writing much of the strip’s dialogue, as well as creating layouts for ghost artists to follow in Eisner’s style.)

Following the end of The Spirit, Feiffer moved to the Village Voice, where he created a weekly strip initially titled Sick Sick Sick — which would also be the name of his first solo strip collection, published in 1958. The strip was a hit with Voice readers and beyond, leading to not only the strip being syndicated across the US, but also other opportunities for his work; he’d create cartoons for everything from the LA Times and The New Yorker to Playboy and Esquire, as write children’s books, adult novels, plays, musicals, and more. As an illustrator, he created the artwork for The Phantom Tollbooth even as he was also researching and creating the iconic comic book history book The Great Comic Book Heroes. He wrote the screenplays for Robert Altman’s Popeye and his unproduced play Carnal Knowledge was adapted into one of Mike Nichols’ most acclaimed movies. He also created 1979’s Tantrum, widely regarded as one of the first graphic novels to be published in the US.

Throughout all of this, Feiffer retained an admirable restlessness in terms of creativity and an openness to new ideas and new opportunities. His last book before his death was published just last year — Amazing Grapes, somewhat amazingly his first graphic novel aimed at children — and he was still working at the time of his death at age 95 from congestive heart failure, creating what has been described as a “visual memoir.” Such an attitude was as much an inspiration to other creators as Feiffer’s work itself.

Feiffer is survived by his wife, JZ Holden, and three children.