Who Needs Halloween When You’ve Got Feiffer and the Bomb?

Here at Archives Central we decided to take a look at how the Voice has covered Halloween over the years. We discovered that during the paper’s earliest decade, All Hallows Eve was not yet the national blowout of altered-state alter egos it has since become. But in the October 29, 1958, issue we found house cartoonist Jules Feiffer deeply concerned with a horror the entire world has lived with since 1945 — nuclear annihilation.

Feiffer (born 1929, in the Bronx) found in the Bomb the ultimate bogeyman for those neurotic New Yorkers who have been his stock-in-trade characters since his cartoons first appeared in the Voice, in October 1956. Feiffer’s vision of a “bomb that will blow up the whole works,” which could be used as a “deterrent for peace,” beat Terry Southern and Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb to the punch by half a decade.

Below, in glorious black and yellowed white, all four pages of Feiffer’s “BOOM.”