JUANA SUMMERS, HOST:
Oscar and Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist, playwright and novelist, Jules Feiffer, has died at the age of 95. In loose, sprawling lines, Feiffer created precocious kids, neurotic office workers, scared dads, optimistic dancers, crooked politicians - a whole world of people probably too smart and self-aware for their own good. Jules Feiffer died at his home in upstate New York. NPR's Neda Ulaby has our appreciation.
NEDA ULABY, BYLINE: If you were a kid in the last 50 years, you probably met Jules Feiffer in the pages of "The Phantom Tollbooth," the 1961 novel about a disaffected boy who's given a magic tollbooth and drives through in his toy car to mysterious places like Dictionopolis.
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UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #1: (As character) Where words are weird.
HANS CONRIED: (As King Azaz) Words, in a word, are fantastic. You can hear them. You can say them.
ULABY: That's from a 1970 movie version. Feiffer's gloriously loopy illustrations brought the book's deadpan surrealism to life. Feiffer told NPR's Robert Siegel in 2015 he started drawing to amuse himself when he was very small.
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JULES FEIFFER: I did nothing else. I mean, it - first of all, I was born in 1929 when all sorts of things happened. The Depression hit, but also the adventure comic strip hit.
(SOUNDBITE OF RADIO SHOW, "TARZAN")
UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #2: (As character) This season, will Tarzan rescue?
ULABY: "Tarzan" and "Buck Rogers" were comics and radio serials - a perfect escape for an imaginative child in a struggling Bronx Jewish family.
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FEIFFER: So, in a way, this was a comic birth.
ULABY: Feiffer was still a kid when he won a gold medal in a department store art contest. He decided that becoming a cartoonist was the way to go. He poured over comic strips in the newspapers his father brought home, even pulled old scraps out of the trash. One of his very favorites was called "The Spirit," created by the legendary Will Eisner. So at the age of 16, after a few years of studying art, Feiffer looked Eisner up in the phone book and took himself over to the artist's Wall Street studio.
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FEIFFER: I was terrified. He couldn't have been friendlier until he looked at my work and told me I had no talent.
(LAUGHTER)
ULABY: That's from a Skype appearance at a 2017 event honoring Will Eisner. Despite that less than auspicious beginning, Jules Feiffer talked his way into a job with Eisner's studio. It was interrupted when he was drafted in 1951. Feiffer's two years in the service left him with a lasting anger at the Army and a penchant for satire, which he expressed in a story called "Munro," about a 4-year-old boy drafted by mistake.
(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "MUNRO")
UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #3: (As character) Soldiers don't cry.
SETH DEITCH: (As Munro, crying).
UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #3: (As character) Only little boys cry.
ULABY: "Munro" did not look like anything else on the comics pages, and Feiffer had a hard time getting publishers interested. But in 1956, he took some of his cartoons to the Village Voice. That led to a 40-year run. And "Munro," Feiffer eventually turned it into an animated short in 1961 and won an Oscar for it.
(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "MUNRO")
UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #3: (As character) Are you a soldier or a little, teensy-weensy, crying baby boy?
ULABY: Over the years, Jules Feiffer wrote kids' books, novels, plays, movie scripts, and he never stopped drawing. In 1986, he won a Pulitzer Prize for editorial cartooning. The Village Voice dropped him a decade later, but Feiffer went on to create cartoons for Vanity Fair, The New York Times, and he wrote graphic novels. Here he is again, talking to NPR's Robert Siegel in 2015.
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ROBERT SIEGEL: You've had a few acts, you know?
FEIFFER: Yes. Yeah. Well, I've had endless acts because I ran out of steam on one thing or because life happened on another thing, and I developed a resourcefulness, where I would just look around for some other way to do what I wanted to do.
ULABY: One of Feiffer's recurring characters was a dancer in a black leotard, who threw herself around the page while musing about the horrors of the world. Whatever the problems and disasters, and however often hope is dashed, she rises up and dances again, he once said. She'll never be defeated by the realities. Neda Ulaby, NPR News.
(SOUNDBITE OF A TRIBE CALLED QUEST SONG, "CAN I KICK IT?") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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