Dancing Through the Years

She has no name, yet is famous. She’s The Dancer, the tall, willowy, raven-haired, incredibly artistic woman in black ballet tights who appears in Jules Feiffer’s cartoon strip. But only three times a year.

Each time she does her dance--first to spring, then autumn, then the New Year. She originally was based on his first real girlfriend, Feiffer says, a modern dancer he met in the ‘50s.

“I would go to recitals with her, and just picked up on the oddness and sweetness of it,” he says. “Long after I broke up with her, I came up with The Dancer, the character in the cartoon.”

Love takes all shapes and sizes, even in cartoons, even in the case of The Dancer. In the beginning, Feiffer says, she physically resembled that modern dancer he knew. It wasn’t always so in later years, he explains.

“I found out, quite by accident over the years, that her figure was kind of altered, depending on who I was in love with at the moment.”