The Daily Cartoon and Live Briefing: Tuesday, February 4, 2025

Notably: Darryl Cagle, the cartoonist and owner of Cagle Cartoons, the syndicate where we get all but Clay Jones’s cartoons for each day’s Briefing, drew the piece above in 2008, around the time of Barack Obama’s dead-on remark about certain Americans: “They get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.” And they vote in large enough numbers to win the presidency. But that’s beside the point. The cartoon was an homage to Jules Feiffer, the great cartoonist–one of the greatest–who died on January 19 at his hime in Richfield Springs, N.Y., at 95. “Mr. Feiffer was primarily known as a cartoonist,” the Times obituary reports. “His syndicated black-and-white comic strip, “Feiffer,” which astringently articulated the cynical, neurotic, aggrieved and ardently left-wing sensibilities of postwar Greenwich Village, began in The Village Voice in 1956 and ran for more than 40 years. But his career also encompassed novels, plays, screenplays, animation and children’s books. A recurrent element in much of his work was his acerbic view of human nature.” His strip was syndicated from 1959 to 2000, reaching 100 newspapers at peak, and winning him a Pulitzer in 1986. (You can scroll through the cartoons that won him the prize here.) The Nation said he had “devastating empathy” in its headline marking the death: “fter watching Gore Vidal’s play An Evening with Richard Nixon (1972) Jules Feiffer unexpectedly found himself “feeling sorry for Nixon…. Just because of the overkill and the setting up of false terms.” Feiffer is a trustworthy guide through the thickets of political art. From 1956 to 1997 in his famous weekly strip in The Village Voice, Feiffer was America’s premier satirical cartoonist, the artist who best captured the tone and timbre of American public rhetoric and private anxiety from the time of Dwight Eisenhower to Bill Clinton. The key to Feiffer’s art was that he avoided the very trap Vidal fell into: Feiffer could be savage in skewering political and cultural folly, but he avoided heavy-handedness by leavening his satire with empathy.” He dies as political cartoonists are being either fired, forced to resign or murdered.

—P.T.

 

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A 1960s strip shows a white construction worker reflecting on the generation gap. “when i went to school,” he muses. “i learned george washington never told a lie—slaves were happy on the plantation—the men who opened the west were giants—and we won every war because god was on our side. when my kids goes to school he learns george washington was a slave owner—slaves hated slavery—the men who opened the west committed genocide—and the wars we won were victories for u.s. imperialism. no wonder my kid’s not an american. they’re teaching him some other country’s history.” What makes this strip so incisive is that it not only lays out a real divide but does so in the voice of a main character—whose opinion Feiffer doesn’t share. It’s perfectly plausible for someone to be aware of the darker narrative of American history while still preferring the more comforting mythology of nationalism. Indeed, that’s how motivated reasoning often works.

–From Jeet Heer’s “Devastating Empathy: Jules Feiffer, 1929-2025,” The Nation, Jan. 30, 2025.

The Cartoon and Live Briefing Archive.