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Post by Crunchy Col on Jun 6, 2020 15:32:05 GMT
Mad magazine’s iconic back-page Fold-In is about to fold it in. Finito after 56 years. Because Al Jaffee, officially the longest-working comic artist ever, has decided to retire at age 99. So to mark his farewell, Mad’s “Usual Gang of Idiots” will salute Jaffee with a tribute issue next week. It will be the magazine’s final regular issue to offer new material, including Jaffee’s final Fold-In, 65 years after he made his Mad debut. “He deserves some spotlight outside our industry,” Mad caricature artist Tom Richmond said of the magazine’s beloved elder statesman, who broke into the business during World War II. One of the most heartfelt features in the send-off issue will be by Sergio Aragones, a fellow Mad legend who befriended Jaffee in 1962 upon joining the staff. They formed a mutual admiration society — both deeply steeped in the craft of the pantomime cartoon — and were occasional roommates on the Mad staff’s storied annual trips to far-flung vacation spots. In the tribute issue, Aragones features his cartooning idol as a character in a series of wordless strips, titled “A Mad Look at Al Jaffee.” “The difference between Al Jaffee and every other cartoonist is that no matter how genius they are,” they typically have a specific area of excellence, said Aragones, who calls the elder cartoonist “a soul mate.” Jaffee, on the other hand, excels in many areas, as writer and artist. From superheroes to funny animals, Aragones says, “nobody has done what he has done: take every branch of cartooning and make it better.” Jaffee worked continuously beginning with Joker Comics in 1942, according to Guinness World Records, which in 2016 awarded him its title of “longest career as a comic artist.” That same year, New York Mayor Bill de Blasio declared March 30 (the cartoonist’s birthday) Al Jaffee Day. “Peanuts” creator Charles Schulz liked to say that Jaffee could draw anything. But the Mad cartoonist became best known for two staples of the magazine: “Snappy Answers to Stupid Questions” and the Mad Fold-In, a format that Jaffee said was a humorous twist on the photo fold-outs then popularized in newsmagazines and Playboy. The Mad Fold-In consists of a single image and question; when the page is folded inward, the condensed image and wording reveal a “hidden” answer that satirizes politics, pop culture and social trends. Jaffee appreciated the opportunity to be such a free-range humorist, satirizing whatever he found funny. Rarely missing an issue, Jaffee created more than 500 Fold-In pages. A typical example appeared in the summer of 1972, when the magazine, at its cultural zenith, was reaching millions of monthly readers. During that era’s national conversation over conservation, the Fold-In question asked, “What beloved American animal will never become extinct because of overwhelming support?”; the answer and picture: “Mickey Mouse.” Peers marvel at the consistent satiric sharpness of Jaffee, who has received the National Cartoonists Society’s Reuben Award and was inducted into the Will Eisner Hall of Fame. “The most remarkable thing about him is he has been doing it at the highest of levels for over seven decades,” Richmond said. “That is more than remarkable — it is literally without comparison.” Richmond thinks Jaffee is the ideal blend “of genius writing, razor-sharp wit, seemingly endless creativity and ideas and brilliant art,” yet also believes he is underappreciated. “But among cartoonists or people who really know about the art form,” Richmond said, “he’s Zeus among the lesser gods.” Jaffee said in a 2016 Baltimore Comic-Con session that hardship sharpened his humor. He was born in Savannah, Ga., but life grew rough during the six years of childhood he spent on a shtetl in his mother’s Zarasai — what he called “the Siberia of Lithuania” — with food in short supply and no running waters or toys. Jaffee said that his father, who was back in America, would send him comic strips, including “Dick Tracy” and “Little Orphan Annie.” Young Jaffee, inspired and making due, learned to draw using a stick in the sand, impressing even the bullying kids in the shtetl. Yet such life also bred his distrust of authority figures, leading to his eagerness to poke a satiric stick in the eye of political and social leaders. Within a decade, Jaffee would break into comics, working a stint at Timely Comics, the precursor to Marvel. (Meanwhile, his mother stayed back in Lithuania during World War II, and he never saw her again.) Jaffee, who has drawn for many publications and created syndicated comics, has said it never seemed like hard work because he loved what he did. “I guess I’m childish in a way,” he said. “I’m living the life I wanted all along, which was to make people think and laugh.” But don’t tell the Mad editors that, he likes to say, or “they’ll stop paying me.” And fittingly, Jaffee had a snappy answer to The Post’s stupidest question: “Are you proud that your work with Mad endures?” Jaffee’s smart reply: “I would be stupid to say, ‘No.’ ” www.washingtonpost.com/arts-entertainment/2020/06/06/al-jaffee-mad-magazine-retires/?fbclid=IwAR12OsXkpWb4DHtPjazn71uc-wVrl9OfkEOCkuZzsnmWVTyf_9Kasy44DxY
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Post by sloopjohnc on Jun 6, 2020 15:55:13 GMT
Those fold-in back covers were the exclamation point of reading the magazine to me. I used to hold off until going through the whole thing to do it.
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rayge
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Post by rayge on Jun 6, 2020 16:07:13 GMT
He's been drawing comics longer than I've been alive. And of course I remember him well, but assumed he had gone before, like all the other Mad greats - the fact that he was still working, sheeesh.
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Post by Half Machine Lipschitz on Jun 6, 2020 16:47:41 GMT
99? Lazy arsehole.
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Sneelock
god
there's a difference, you know...
Posts: 8,431
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Post by Sneelock on Jun 6, 2020 16:56:08 GMT
I think I speak for a lot of people when I say that “snappy answers to stupid questions” was more than a comic feature. It was a way of life. It’s so nice to be able to curtsy with respect while he’s still alive.
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Post by Charlie O. on Jun 6, 2020 17:01:56 GMT
Loses a little something in the translation, don't it?
A giant and a genius. I haven't bought an issue of MAD in decades (I've spoken before about how hugely important it was to me growing up), but I'll pick up that last issue if I can find it.
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Post by Crunchy Col on Apr 11, 2023 1:53:00 GMT
Al Jaffee, King of the Mad Magazine Fold-In, Dies at 102
For 55 years, he encouraged fans of the satiric magazine to mutilate it.
Al Jaffee, a cartoonist who folded in when the trend in magazine publishing was to fold out, thereby creating one of Mad magazine’s most recognizable and enduring features, died on Monday in Manhattan. He was 102.
His death, at a hospital, was caused by multi-system organ failure, his granddaughter Fani Thomson said.
It was in 1964 that Mr. Jaffee created the Mad Fold-In, an illustration-with-text feature on the inside of the magazine’s back cover that seemed at first glance to deliver a straightforward message. When the page was folded in thirds, however, both illustration and text were transformed into something entirely different and unexpected, often with a liberal-leaning or authority-defying message.
For instance, the fold-in from the November 2001 issue asked, “What mind-altering experience is leaving more and more people out of touch with reality?” The unfolded illustration showed a crowd of people popping and snorting various substances. But when folded, the image transformed into the Fox News anchor desk.
The first fold-in, in the April 1964 issue (No. 86), mocked Elizabeth Taylor’s marital record. (Unfolded, she is with Richard Burton; folded, she has traded him in for another guy.) No one, especially Mr. Jaffee, expected that fold-in to be followed by hundreds more.
“It was supposed to be really a one-shot,” he said in a 1993 interview with The Kansas City Star. “But because of the overwhelming demand of three or four of my relatives, it went on to a second time, and on and on.”
That “on and on” turned into a career that included other memorable contributions to Mad, like a “Snappy Answers to Stupid Questions” feature, and that in 2007 won him cartooning’s top honor, the Reuben Award, putting him in the company of Charles M. Schulz, Mort Walker, Gary Larson, Matt Groening and other luminaries of the trade.
With the fold-in, Mad was turning an industry trend on its head. “Playboy, of course, was doing its centerfold,” Mr. Jaffee told The Star. “Life, in almost every issue, was doing a three- or four-page gatefold showing how dinosaurs traversed the land, that kind of thing. Even Sports Illustrated had fold-outs.”
Mad went in the other direction, literally, although Mr. Jaffee said in a 2008 interview with The New York Times that he initially didn’t expect the magazine’s editor, Al Feldstein, and publisher, William M. Gaines, to go for the notion. “I have this idea,” he recalled telling them. “I think it’s a funny idea, but I know you’re not going to buy it. But I’m going to show it to you anyway. And you’re not going to buy it because it mutilates the magazine.”
The men did buy it, and then asked for more, and the inside back cover quickly became Mr. Jaffee’s turf. Although other regular Mad features changed artists over the years, no one but Mr. Jaffee drew a fold-in for 55 years.
In mid-2019, the magazine announced that it would stop printing issues full of new material, except for year-end specials. In the special issue that appeared at the end of 2019, the cartoonist Johnny Sampson, with Mr. Jaffee’s blessing, became the only other artist to draw a fold-in.
Almost as long-lived as the fold-in was “Snappy Answers to Stupid Questions,” a running compendium of the kind of retorts that people are never quite quick enough or brave enough to toss off in the heat of the moment. “Is it okay to smoke?” asks a man sitting directly under a no-smoking sign in an office. “Yes,” answers the receptionist, “the signs don’t apply to illiterates.”
In real life he was the opposite of a smart aleck: a genteel, unassuming man whose humor was delivered with a wink, not a cudgel.
In real life, however, Mr. Jaffee was the opposite of a smart aleck: a genteel, unassuming man whose in-person humor was delivered with a wink, not a cudgel. He adorned each of his drawings with a tiny self-portrait, a kind of logo, with his name scrawled in his hair. “It’s not that Al does not have an ego,” Sam Viviano, Mad’s art director, said in 2008. “You don’t draw your face into everything you do without some kind of an ego. But it’s a really healthy ego.”
Abraham Jaffee (he later legally changed his name to Allan) was born on March 13, 1921, in Savannah, Ga. His parents, both Jewish, had immigrated from Lithuania, his father, Morris, arriving in New York in 1905 and his mother, Mildred, in 1913.
Morris Jaffee quickly adjusted to the pace of early-20th-century America, starting as a tailor in New York and then taking a job in retailing in Savannah. Mildred, though, was never comfortable in the United States, had some strict religious views and was somewhat unstable, leaving young Al with many traumatic memories.
“If you were to see some naked guy sitting on top of a mountain somewhere in India with pins stuck into his body, how would you know whether the guy was nuts or religious?” Mr. Jaffee recalled in “Al Jaffee’s Mad Life” (2010), a biography written by Mary-Lou Weisman and illustrated by Mr. Jaffee. “My mother was both.”
When Mr. Jaffee was 6, his mother threw their domestic life into turmoil by taking him and his three younger brothers back to her shtetl in Lithuania. The visit was supposed to last a month, but it stretched into a tug of war between the two parents that lasted six years, most of which Al spent in Lithuania living in what he described as 19th-century conditions. But there was a silver lining of sorts: Morris Jaffee sent the boys packages of the Sunday comics from American newspapers, and Al began to find his artistic talent.
His father finally brought him back to the United States for good when Al was 12. On the strength of his artistic ability, he was admitted to the first class of the High School of Music and Art in New York. His fellow students there included several who would later start Mad, but that was still years in the future when he graduated in 1940, directly into the golden age of comics.
“I came onto the scene when they were buying original material, and in a burst of creative who knows what, I created Inferior Man, which was a shameless rip-off of Superman,” Mr. Jaffee said in the 2008 interview. “My basic premise was that he fought crime and evil, but if it became too much for him to handle, he would sneak into some phone booth and change into civilian clothes.”
Will Eisner, then emerging as a force in the comics industry, bought the feature, and Mr. Jaffee went on to do work for Stan Lee, another major name in comics, as well. He began contributing to Mad in 1955, three years after it was founded by Mr. Gaines and Harvey Kurtzman, Mr. Jaffee’s former high school classmate.
When Mr. Kurtzman left Mad in 1956 to try other ventures, including the short-lived magazine Humbug, Mr. Jaffee followed. By 1958, he was back at Mad to stay. He was never on the magazine’s staff, however; all of his work was as a freelancer.
His early Mad contributions were as a writer, though he was honing his illustrating skills in other projects, like “Tall Tales,” a syndicated comic strip he drew from 1957 to 1963. Eventually Mad made him a writer-artist, and with the fold-in and “Snappy Answers” (a feature that first appeared in October 1965) he became one of the stable of regulars who set Mad’s style.
In 1977, Mr. Jaffee married Joyce Revenson, who died in January 2020. His first marriage, to Ruth Ahlquist, whom he had met and married while in the Army in World War II, ended in divorce.
He is survived by two children from his first marriage, Richard Jaffee and Deborah Fishman; two stepdaughters, Tracey and Jody Revenson; five grandchildren; one step-granddaughter; and three great-grandchildren. Mr. Jaffee lived in Manhattan but for years had split his time between his home there and another in Provincetown, Mass.
His Mad work was republished in countless books, many with self-deprecating titles like “Mad’s Vastly Overrated Al Jaffee.” In 2008, Harry N. Abrams published a collection of his “Tall Tales” strips. In 2011, Chronicle Books came out with “The Mad Fold-In Collection: 1964-2010,” a hardcover boxed set.
The impact of Mr. Jaffee’s fold-in gimmick was evident in many imitations and homages over the years, like Beck’s fold-in-themed video of his song “Girl” in 2005. Mr. Jaffee said he would often receive requests from high schools that wanted to create a fold-in for the school paper, mistakenly thinking they needed his permission.
“I write back and say, You have my blessings, go ahead and do it,” he said in 2008. “But no one can copyright folding a piece of paper.” In 2020, Mad celebrated Mr. Jaffee with a “Special All Jaffee Issue,” full of his work. It was to mark his formal retirement, and it included a fold-in that he had created in 2014 in anticipation of that eventuality.
It starts with an image of Alfred E. Neuman, Mad’s mascot, amid assorted stores that have all posted going out of business signs, under the headline “Economy Collapsing! Unemployed Starving!” But when it was folded in, a new message appeared: “No More New Jaffee Fold-Ins.” Mr. Jaffee’s blissful image is seen hovering above the cityscape.www.nytimes.com/2023/04/10/arts/al-jaffee-dead.html
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Post by Charlie O. on Apr 11, 2023 3:53:33 GMT
I mean... a hundred fucking two! We can't be too sad about this.
But I am sad.
R.I.P., maestro.
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