Jules Feiffer Dies: Cartoonist, Playwright & ‘Carnal Knowledge’ Screenwriter Was 95

Jules Feiffer, a Pultizer Prize-winning cartoonist and author who also wrote the screenplay for films, including Carnal Knowledge and Popeye, died Jan. 17 of congestive heart failure at his home in upstate New York. He was 95. His wife, JZ Holden, confirmed his death to the Washington Post.

Feiffer’s long career began at the age of 17 when he became assistant to cartoonist Will Eisner, working with Eisner on his comic strips, including The Spirit. In 1956, he joined The Village Voice as a staff cartoonist where he produced the weekly comic strip “Feiffer” for more than 40 years, until 1997. The comic strip ran in The Village Voice from 1956 until 2000, and was syndicated to more than 100 newspapers.

His entree into the film business came in 1961, with the Oscar-winning animated short Munro, based on his story about a child who is drafted.

He went on to write what became his best-known screenplay for the Mike Nichols-directed Carnal Knowledge in 1971, starring Jack Nicholson and Art Garfunkel. He also penned the screenplay for the Robert Altman-helmed Popeye in 1980.

Also a playwright, Feiffer penned 1967’s Little Murders, Feiffer’s People (1969) and Knock Knock (1976).

Feiffer was the author of novels,1963’s Harry the Rat with Women and 1977’s Ackroyd, as well as several children’s books, including Bark, George; Henry, The Dog with No Tail; A Room with a Zoo; The Daddy Mountain; and A Barrel of Laughs, a Vale of Tears.

He teamed with Disney and writer Andrew Lippa to adapt his book The Man in the Ceiling into a musical. He also illustrated the children’s books The Phantom Tollbooth and The Odious Ogre. His non-fiction includes the 1965 book The Great Comic Book Heroes, the first history of the comic-book superheroes of the late 1930s and early 1940s. He penned his first graphic novel, Tantrum, in 1979. In 2014, he published Kill My Mother, a praised graphic novel and a loving homage to the pulp-inspired films and comic strips of his youth

Feiffer won the Pulitzer Prize in 1986 for editorial cartooning, and in 2004 he was inducted into the Comic Book Hall of Fame. In 1995, he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters and in 2014 he was honored by the Writers Guild of America with a lifetime achievement award.