"In October 1956, Mr. Feiffer strolled into the office of The Village Voice, which had been founded the previous year, and offered to draw a regular strip for nothing."

"First titled 'Sick, Sick, Sick,' it eventually became 'Feiffer.' (He was not paid, he later wrote, until 1964.) With his signature sketchy, scribbly lines, Mr. Feiffer sought to bring to a six- or nine-panel format a level of visual simplicity and intellectual sophistication akin to what William Steig and Saul Steinberg had done with their cartoons in The New Yorker. Often devoid of backgrounds and panel borders, Mr. Feiffer’s strip focused almost exclusively on dialogue, gestures and facial expressions.... He would present a couple bickering with each other in profile, or someone in therapy, often with the speaker facing the reader.... Complacent, self-satisfied white liberals were a frequent target, and he upbraided them mercilessly.... The leotard-clad Dancer, who first appeared in 1957, was inspired by a girlfriend. She was... Mr. Feiffer wrote, 'abused and exploited by men.... but where [her male counterpart, based on himself] grew defensive and angry over the years, the Dancer retained her faith. She danced, fell, got to her feet, tripped, sailed aloft, came crashing to earth, rose stubbornly and kept dancing.'"

From "Jules Feiffer, Acerbic Cartoonist, Writer and Much Else, Dies at 95/In his long-running Village Voice comic strip and in his many plays and screenplays, he took delight in skewering politics, relationships and human nature" (NYT).

Feiffer also wrote the screenplay for "Carnal Knowledge" and the Robert Altman version of "Popeye," and his play "Little Murders" became one of my favorite movies from 1971:

I blogged about that movie when I re-watched it in 2021. I called it "a weird and very dark romcom about what happens when a thoroughly apathetic man (Elliott Gould) goes along for the relationship with a entirely energetically optimistic woman." And I said "I don't think there's a better bad wedding than in that movie, with Don Sutherland as the hippie priest."

Since I'm not in the mood to blog about that bishop who sermonized at Donald Trump today, I'll give you what Jules Feiffer wrote for the completely inappropriate wedding priest to say: 

"Why does one decide to marry? Social pressure? Boredom? Loneliness? Sexual appeasement? Love? I won't put any of these reasons down. Each in its own way is adequate, each is all right. Last year, I married a musician who wanted to get married in order to stop masturbating. Please, don't be startled, I'm not putting him down. That marriage did not work. But the man tried. He is now separated, still masturbating, but he is at peace with himself because he tried society's way."