[Editor’s note, October 28, 2025: 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 — the potential for nuclear annihilation.
Feiffer (1929-2025) found in the Bomb the ultimate bogeyman for those neurotic New Yorkers who were his stock-in-trade characters since his cartoons first appeared in the Voice, in October 1956. The Bronx-born 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 graphic opus.]
BOOM
By Jules Feiffer
October 29, 1958
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