Ed Sorel writes about "My Friend Jules Feiffer"

Ed Sorel writes about "My Friend Jules Feiffer - An afternoon with one of the greatest political cartoonists of the past century" for The Atlantic.

"'In a way, I owe the career I’ve had as a caricaturist to Jules,' Edward Sorel writes. 'His work as a cartoonist, a novelist, a playwright, and a creator of children’s books over the past 70 years inspired me to attempt things I never would have without his example.”'

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"'It’s difficult for a generation younger than mine to realize how important Jules’s drawings were to so many of us in America in the 1950s and ’60s,' Sorel writes. There were some great cartoonists, but not so much when it came to the kind of sophisticated social and political commentary we now take for granted. The era of 'Doonesbury' and 'The Simpsons,' which Jules helped make possible, had yet to come. 'Newspaper cartoons didn’t really focus on relationships, therapy, conformity, self-doubt, or the latest fads in lifestyle and literature.'

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Despite his dizzying array of creative undertakings—his critical history 'The Great Comic Book Heroes'; his illustrations for 'The Phantom Tollbooth'; and the Oscar-winning animated film 'Munro,' about a little boy who is drafted into the Army—Jules never missed a deadline in the 41 years that his cartoon strip appeared in 'The Village Voice.' 'Most of the time, I felt I held my own against Jules’s sequential drawings, but not when it came to the war in Vietnam. On that subject, Jules couldn’t be touched,' Sorel writes."

Sorel reflects on the life and career of his friend, and contemplates how he will be remembered.