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Jules Feiffer, Acerbic Cartoonist, Writer and Much Else, Dies at 95


Around 1980, the movie producer Robert Evans recruited Mr. Feiffer to write the screenplay for Robert Altman’s “Popeye.” Mr. Feiffer patterned his script after the Segar newspaper strip, not the animated adaptations made by the Fleischer brothers in the 1930s and ’40s. When E.C. Segar’s daughter saw the movie, Mr. Feiffer told The Comics Journal in 1988, she called to tell him that he had captured the essence of her father’s creation — at which, Mr. Feiffer added, he cried. Though it met a mixed critical reaction, the film, starring Robin Williams as Popeye and Shelley Duvall as Olive Oyl, was a hit.

On the set of “Popeye,” Mr. Feiffer met his second wife, Jenny Allen, who was then a reporter for Life magazine and who went on to become a playwright, humorist and monologuist. They divorced in 2014. (His first marriage, to Judy Sheftel, a book editor, had also ended in divorce.) Mr. Feiffer married Ms. Holden, a freelance writer, in 2016.

In addition to his wife, he is survived by his daughters, Kate Feiffer, a children’s book author who collaborated with him; Halley Feiffer, a playwright and actress; Julie Feiffer, a landscaper and shopkeeper in Martha’s Vineyard, Mass.; and two granddaughters.

In May 1997, Mr. Feiffer ended his affiliation with The Village Voice over a salary dispute. “It’s not that I’ve slipped,” he said at the time. “It’s that I’m too expensive.” (In April 2008, he returned for a one-shot, full-page take on Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign.)

Later in life he derived great pleasure from writing and drawing children’s books, some in collaboration with his daughter Kate, among them “The Man in the Ceiling” (1993), “Bark, George” (1999), “By the Side of the Road” (2002), “The Daddy Mountain” (2004) and “A Room With a Zoo” (2005). A 2010 reunion project with Mr. Juster, “The Odious Ogre,” was warmly reviewed.



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