By Mel Gussow

Jules Feiffer ended his syndicated comic strip in 2000 with a quartet of final cartoon panels. In them the signature character, a stringy-haired modern dancer, entered into a disputatious dialogue with the artist, who was desperately claiming his own place in the spotlight. It was, he said, “my turn to dance,” and in the last cartoon Mr. Feiffer's version of himself — bald, bearded but still dreaming about morphing into Fred Astaire — tipped his top hat and exclaimed: “Wait for my big finish! You'll be dazzled!” Well, the dazzle has arrived, with a retrospective at the New-York Historical Society of Mr. Feiffer's 50-year career and a new play, “A Bad Friend” (about family and politics in the 1950's), scheduled to open in June at Lincoln Center. Abandoning the strip forced Mr. Feiffer to increase his activities in other areas: writing and illustrating children's books (two out last year) and publishing his drawings in The New Yorker and The New York Times, among others. Several weeks ago he went to Hollywood to talk about doing his first feature-length cartoon.

“The big surprise has been how easy it was to give up the weekly strip,” he said recently, “and how I haven't missed it at all.”

He said he was relieved not to be drawing political cartoons during this time of missile rattling: “It seems to me what made me a serious political artist was that I always believed that what I did, along with other cartoonists, could effect change in some way. I no longer have that illusion. Nothing I could do is going to change the mind of Paul Wolfowitz, Donald Rumsfeld or Dick Cheney. How happy I am that I stumbled into all these other forms.”

His versatility may be accidental, but he has become masterly in each of his various roles, as artist, playwright and author, and all aspects are amply illustrated at the Historical Society. The exhibition, “Julz Rulz: Inside the Mind of Jules Feiffer” (which runs through May 18), follows his career from 4 to 74. It was as a child in the Bronx that he began to draw. At the beginning of the show there is a portrait of a lion with a gaping mouth, drawn after a visit to the circus and dated by the artist's mother, April 1934. (continued on screen 2)