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.