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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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