New Delhi: Legendary cartoonist Al Jaffe, who created two staple features for Mad magazine, the ‘Fold-In’ and ‘Snappy Answers to Stupid Questions’, died at the age of 102 Monday.
Jaffee worked as a professional cartoonist for a record 77 years, from 1942 till 2020, which earned him a place in the Guinness World Records. He retired at the age of 99.
He began working for Mad in 1955, three years after it was launched, and his decision to retire coincided with the magazine’s decision to stop publishing fresh material.
Jaffee was born in Savannah, Georgia, but at the age of six, his mother took him and his three younger siblings to a Lithuanian shtetl from which she had emigrated and where their father lived. The children stayed in Lithuania for the next six years while his parents fought over custody of the three children. It was during his time that Jaffee was introduced to American cartoons by his father. He later moved to the US with his father.
Jaffee was Mad’s longest-serving contributor and one of the magazine’s defining voices, from the 1950s, through the Vietnam war period and beyond. He also wrote the column ‘Al Jaffee’s Mad Inventions’ for the magazine.
The maverick cartoonist
In 2008, Jaffe was awarded the Reuben Award, a top prize given by the National Cartoonists Society in the US. Cartoonist and New Yorker contributor Arnold Roth once referred to Jaffee as “one of the great cartoonists of our time”.
The ‘Fold-In’ feature in Mad is a single-page illustration with a question at the top and a caption underneath. The question is answered when the paper is folded vertically into thirds, when the two outside pieces merge to form a new image and a new caption.
Jaffe’s non-Mad work was likewise informed by his maverick nature. By creating a vertical cartoon whose comedy is exposed as the eye descends down the panel, his syndicated newspaper comic strip ‘Tall Tales‘ (1957–1963) challenged the conventions of the horizontal form.
He was also the creator of ‘Inferior Man’, a spoof on Superman, a superhero who immediately changes into civilian clothes and hides in a phone booth at the first sign of trouble.
His contributions to Mad have been collected in dozens of books, some of which have humorously dismissive titles like ‘Mad’s Vastly Overrated Al Jaffee’. A compilation of Harry N. Abrams’ ‘Tall Tales’ strip was released in 2008. The Mad Fold-In Collection: 1964–2010, a hardback boxed set published by Chronicle Books, was released in 2011.
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