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| 1921-1923 |
Longtime, very longtime, Mad magazine cartoonist Al Jaffee died April 10 at the age of 102. Seven years earlier, Jaffee, then still a working artist, took time out from his work schedule to give some insights on how he got by as one of "The Usual Gang of Idiots" at Mad:
Jaffee finally retied from Mad in 2020. It seems to have been a voluntary retirement. The magazine itself for all practical purposes was retired by corporate owner EC Comics Kinney National Company AOL Time Warner Communications AT&T Media Bros Discovery, Inc.--did I leave out DC Comics? Ted Turner? Hanna-Barbara? --two years earlier, subsisting mostly on reprints, though Jaffee did manage to get two original works published, the Fold-Ins that he was best known for, in that period. So he got paid for a job at a job that no longer existed. How many of us can say that?
Al Jaffee had an unusual, and somewhat tragic, childhood. Born in the United States to Jewish immigrants from Lithuania, Jaffee's homesick mother moved him and his brothers back to the shtetl (Yiddish for small town) where she had grown up, while the father stayed behind. With the rise of Nazism and the increasing possibility that there would be a war, the father insisted the boys come back to America. The mother herself refused to budge. She disappeared in the Holocaust.
"I dealt with it long ago and determined that moving on to happy, new adventures were more rewarding than dwelling on old tragedies."
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| Jaffee and Elder |
One of those happy, new adventures may have been New York City's High School of Music & Art, a magnet school established by then-Mayor Fiorello H. LaGuardia for artistically inclined adolescents. There Jaffee befriended, or was befriended by, Will Elder, who would go on to become one of Mad's original artists (though he may have gained as much renown for Playboy's long-running Little Annie Fanny strip.)
One of Jaffee's first jobs as a cartoonist was at Timely Comics, a predecessor of Marvel Comic, where he wrote and drew a superhero parody called Inferior Man. Looks like he used the opportunity to get back at Hitler for what he did to his family.
Jaffee had a single-panel syndicated newspaper strip for a few years in the late 1950s and early 1960s.
The above looks like Mad, but it's actually from a short-lived competitor, Trump, created and edited by Harvey Kurtzman (who in fact had earlier created and edited Mad.) Jaffee worked there and at another short-lived Kurtzman magazine Humbug, before finally deciding to give Mad itself a try. Publisher William M. Gaines looked at Jaffee's work in both magazines, liked, and probably laughed at, what he saw, and gave Al a job. For some 65 years Jaffee regularly entertained Mad readers with Snappy Answers to Stupid Questions, proposals for wacky inventions, the Vietnam era Hawks and Doves, and of course the famous Fold-Ins. Enjoy:
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I loved Mad Magazine, Al Jaffe, and his back-cover fold-ins. The man was a genius.
ReplyDeleteMitchell, if all he'd done was those fold-ins, he'd be a legend.
DeleteHi, Kirk!
ReplyDeleteI see that The Reaper is back in business or, more correctly, that you are back in business filing your Reaper Reports, albeit belatedly in this case. It's ironic that I unwittingly paid tribute to Al Jaffee only a few days before he died by posting that Mad gif at the end of my Paul Lynde tribute.
Al Jaffee's is a very familiar name from my youth, and so are the words "Here we go with another..." because I read and collected Mad for years. I loved his zany Fold-Ins and Snappy Answers to Stupid Questions features. It's a tough break that Al lost his mom in the Holocaust. Thanks for tracing Al's career through the years and showing us many examples of the iconic images the gifted cartoonist created along the way.
I almost missed this one, Shady. I only came across Jaffee's passing when I was skimming through Mark Evanier's blog in the sidebar to the right.
DeleteHello Kirk, I was never a reader of Mad, but while looking in Cleveland last summer for books to bring back I found a few Mad paperbacks, including some by Al Jaffee, so decided to add them in. It's funny how things you had ignored previously are now regarded with nostalgia. At any rate, he had quite a run, as your generous sampling of his works demonstrates.
ReplyDelete--Jim
Jim, I congratulate you on finding a Mad paperback. I thought they were all out of print. Used to be a time when you went to the drugstore and on the paperback rack there'd be at least one Mad as well as one Peanuts book. If I had the money I'd buy them both.
DeleteSome of my school contemporaries, including my step brother, loved Mad. I never quite got it at the time but I can see now it was quite clever humour.
ReplyDeleteAndrew, in the video clip Jaffee quotes William M. Gaines as saying something like "If some kid buys this magazine...", indicating that the Mad staff knew exactly who comprised the biggest part of their readership, yet they never, ever wrote down to that audience. If they referenced something that only an adult who read the newspaper daily would understand, then it was up to the kid to find out what the hell they were talking about. That magazine actually ended up making me more well-informed than I otherwise would have been as a 12-yeqr-old.
DeleteThat's good. You started off with a Mad Magazine type of joke.
ReplyDelete1921-1923
The only way to do it, Mike.
DeleteI was a big fan of MAD magazine and Al Jaffee back in the 1970s when I was a teenager. Both were an important part of my intellectual development and way of viewing the world! I didn't know of his early life experience and, sad as it was, his mother's was sadder.
ReplyDeleteThat's true, Debra. God knows what happened to his mother.
DeleteFor several years MAD magazine was my very very very favourite magazine. I remember marvelling that anything could be so good. I suspect I was living abroad when I got it, perhaps at the CANEX stores, because I seem to feel that it was really hard to find in England. In the end I stopped seeing it around. After all these years I had just about forgotten it but your post brought back the way I used to feel every time I opened a copy! Good old Jaffee.
ReplyDeleteI know MAD had foreign editions, Jenny, but I don't know if England was one of them. Seems like there would be, as the language obviously wouldn't need any changing. It's good that you found it wherever you did.
DeleteI loved Mad magazine growing up. I especially loved the Fold Ins. I liked when the magazine made fun of current movies as well. I should kept all the issues I bought. Hindsight is 20/20 right?
ReplyDeleteThere's always reprints, JM.
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