Al Jaffee might have turned 88 last week, but the artist shows no sign of stopping. Since 1964, he has appeared in nearly every issue of Mad Magazine, having pioneered some of that publication’s most-beloved and longest lasting features, including the Fold-in and Snappy Answers to Stupid Questions. To say that Jaffee has been a major influence in modern American gag writing seems like a gross understatement. Along with early Mad peers like Harvey Kurtzman, Will Elder, and Jack Davis, Jaffee pratically invented the stuff.

In this third and final part of our interview with the artist, we dive back into Jaffee’s early career, from his first days with Mad, to the creation of the humor magazines Trump and Humbug—and beyond.

[Part One]

[Part Two]
For the past 60 years, you haven’t really done much “serious” work. It seems safe to say that humor is definitely your passion.

Humor was a passion for me—satire, definitely. I just love poking pins in overblown balloons. There’s so much crap being disseminated when you listen to politicians and Madison Avenue-types and ambitious businessmen. All of the hype that goes into showbusiness and almost everything—everything’s ripe for being brought down to earth. It’s fun to do that, but I like to believe that I’m not mean spirited about it. I think when you get heavy-handed in humor, I don’t think it works as well. There’s a recent cartoon that I haven’t seen but have heard about that seemed to imply that Obama was a chimpanzee, I think that it starts to be ineffective. There could have been many other ways to do it that could have been effective.

You mentioned earlier that there aren’t as many humor magazines as there once were, but it seems that, in a political, socio-economic sense, we need that manner of satire more than ever.

Well, I think my view of that is that it’s been that way throughout history and it will always be that way. You’re always going to have somebody who’s power hungry, who is corrupt, who is self-serving and who is powerful—and who is trying to take advantage of ordinary people who are simply trying to get by. This is a role that newspapers had played throughout history when it’s a free press. They can point out this stuff. So I really hate to see magazines and newspapers go down because they’ve done a wonderful job in a free society of trying to point out these power hungry people trying to take advantage of the rest of us. But I think maybe the Internet will take over that job. There’s a lot of stuff there, and they’re doing it. I don’t think there’s anything unique on in our society right now that hasn’t been going on in the history of society and will probably go on for the rest of eternity.

Getting back to your early work for a moment, something that strikes me as interesting is the fact that you began your career as a comic artist and then joined the Mad team as soon as they moved away from comics.

Well, you know, my so-called career has been one of fortuitious accidents. People seem to come to me and make offers to me just at the time that I need them. I had no idea that Harvey Kurtzman, when he was doing Mad, would have any interest in working with me. But he did come to me. At first I said, “no,” because I didn’t think I’d be able to make as good a living as I was making with Timely Comics, but certain things happened and I was able to leave Timely Comics and join Mad, briefly. Then Harvey was no longer with Mad, so I went to him with Trump and then Humbug, then back to Mad. I think most of these things happened without any effort on my part. And that’s true, when I look back on it, I think after my first trip with my portfolio to see Will Eisner, while he was doing The Spirit and other comics, after I showed that to him and he hired me to do Inferior Man, that was the last time I ever showed anyone my portfolio. And that was in 1940.

The Mad job seems especially fortuitous. You knew Kurtzman fairly early on.

I didn’t know him well. I knew of him, mostly. He was a freshman in my high school when I was a senior. I became aware of him because his teachers put up drawings that he was making that were very, very amusing. I remember one in particular. He did a huge crowd scene of a class boat trip up the Hudson River. The school used to have an annual boat trip as kind of a reward for the kids. And Kurtzman, as a freshman, went on this boat ride and then did a wonderful drawing of it, and it was posted on the bulletin board. And then a classmate of mine came up to me and said, “you’d better look out, because there’s this freshman kid who’s terrific.” Because I known as one of the top cartoonists in the school, along with Will Elder. Willie and I were both seniors, and we went to look at this drawing by Kurtzman and it really was very impressive. And that’s the last I heard of him until I was an editor at Timely and Kurtzman was bringing in his comic page called, Hey Look.

It was wonderful and every time Kurtzman came in with Hey Look—and I didn’t really know him at the time, I knew of him—all of us would jump up and go look at it. It was a treat. We felt that way very seldom because most of the work that was coming in was just routine jobs that everyone had to do. You weren’t going to get excited over a new Human Torch or a new Mighty Mouse, or whatever. But Harvey Kurtzman’s stuff was so unique that we all ran over to see what the latest page was. A couple of years ago I saw a book of his stuff and it still holds up.

Is that the Fantagraphics book?

Yeah, I think that had a lot of it. And I had another book of Hey Look—I have no idea where it is now, because every time I’ve had to move, I had to get rid of stuff. So I didn’t get to know Harvey as much as he knew about me. He went to work with Will Elder and later Jack Davis and John Severin. And I heard through the grapevine that, ever since high school, he wanted to get Will Elder and me to work with him on any idea he could come up with. So it turned out that way.

Was that part of the original success of your teaming, that everyone came from the same place and had similar sensibilities?

Yeah, I think that had a lot to do with it. the main thing, of course, is that Harvey Kurtzman had a great eye and a great ear. He focused on the people and the work very intensely and he would file it in the back of his mind. He would see just some little thing that we did and he would file that away and say, “someday I’ve got to hire that guy.” He had that kind of a feel. And he worked very hard to make it come true and it did come true. We all came together, eventually, and even put out our own magazine, Humbug, which will live again in a two book set.

One final question, pertaining to comics.

Sure.

I know that you moved to the United States at a fairly young age. Do you remember the first comic book you ever read?

Yeas, I do remember. It was 1933 and I was in a small village, living with relatives—the name was South Fallsburg, in upstate New York. I was sitting on a bench in front of a candy store, and then suddenly my eyes opened like saucers, because I saw something Famous Funnies. By coincidence, it was created by Bill Gaines’s father. There’s a long story attached to that and there’s some argument about whether Bill Gaines created it or Harry Donenfeld, of DC Comics was the originator, or somebody else. But, to the best of my knowledge, Max Gaines got the idea of putting Sunday funnies into a small 64-page magazine. And these would be reprints of the Sunday funnies, which is why they were called Famous Funnies. And he experimented by putting them in candy stores and then going back later in the day and then finding out later in the day that wherever he left them, they were sold out, immediately. That’s my impression of how the comic book industry got going.

So your first comic book was probably the first comic book, ever.

That’s my impression. I couldn’t afford to buy it for $0.10, so I read it at the store.

–Brian Heater

Before accepting a full-time gig at Harvey Kurtzman’s Mad Magazine, Al Jaffee kicked around the comics industry, writing anything his editors would throw at him, from funny animal books, to “teenage material,” to army comics, to crime books. The artist even dabbled a bit in the superhero genre—albeit with a distinctly Jaffeean take on the subject

It was his boss at Timely—a young editor by the name of Stan Lee—who assigned Jaffee work on a title called Super Rabbit. Under the artist’s control, the superhero was transformed into something different than the rest of the books on the market. The costumed lagomorph became a hero with problems—normal, everyday problems.

It was a decision, perhaps, that would have an impact on Stan Lee’s later success (if only subconsciously), as Timely became Marvel and the editor churned out book after book of venerable heroes, decidedly real world counterparts to the supermen who dominated the industry.

In this second part of our interview with Jaffee, we delve into the artist’s pre-Mad work and discuss how the early world of comic books shaped the artist’s later successes in the industry.

[Part One]

I know it’s hard for a lot of artists to give up a sense of autonomy—to have to do work by committee. Was it ever difficult having to answer to editors?

No, it never is, because Mad has had crackerjack people. The editors that they have now are tops. They anticipate my problems. They’re not going to throw something at me that is utterly impossible, you know. They have a very good sense of what’s practical and what’s not, and we just have a terrific working relationship and have had for many years now, and I love working with them, because they’re just really good at it. And I think they like working with me because I view my role as the problem solver. Editors like to work with people who can take the thing and go with it, and I’ve been able to do that, so I solve their problems, they solve mine.

I assume it was a little different when you first started in the comics industry—when you were working with Timely ad publishers of that ilk. What was the creative pipeline like, back then?

Well, my relationships with editors with all stripes have always been very good because it’s easier to work with editors if you’re a writer/artist. If you can write, because editors have a lot of problems on their mind, because they’re not just working with me or one other guy. They’re working with a dozen other people or more, and they just want the problem solved. When I first started with Stan Lee, my first assignment—we didn’t know each other from anything, I just came in with my portfolio—he threw a script at me and said, “if you can do this, we’ll work together.” I took the script and interpreted it. It was called Swat Car Squad. I didn’t create it—somebody wrote it and I did the artwork on it. When I turned it in, he was very happy and he said, “can you write it and draw it?” I said, “sure.”

The next script I wrote and drew and handed it to him, and he said, “okay, from now on, you just do it and don’t even show me the script. Just write it and draw it.” And so, in essence, he got rid of a problem. He got rid of the problem of finding a writer to hand something to an artist who would have to interpret the writing correctly. All of that is wiped out, when the artist writes his own stuff. So, my relationship with Stan Lee continued on that way for my entire relationship with him. He never saw a script of mine. All he said was, “do a six page story, do a five page story.” And I would just write it, draw it, ink it, hand it in for lettering, and that would be the last time I heard of it. And I think it’s a mutually excellent relationship, when the editor can rely on a writer/artist, so he can pay attention to other problems that don’t solve themselves so easily. So, it’s been a good situation for me throughout my career because I just didn’t have any problems. I didn’t have any rejections, I didn’t have any editors sitting over my shoulder. Everything ran very smoothly.

Did you get the sense that with Stan Lee it was like that with the other writer/artists? Or was your relationship something of a special case?

Well, I’m not familiar with how many writer/artists he had. When I worked for him, as an associate editor, there were artist/writers like Morris Weiss, who was doing a number of comic books. He packaged the entire comic book. He would write it, he would draw it, and I think even letter it. He delivered it to me when I was the associate editor. He worked the same way that I always worked with Stan Lee. He didn’t have any editorial supervision. He just did it and turned it in. there must have been others as well, but I don’t think that that was the way it was with the superheroes.

Stan Lee really supervised the superhero scripts very closely, because Stan is a very good writer in his own right, and he knew how he wanted the stories and the characters developed, and he wasn’t going to let anyone go off course. It was easier in the humor department and the teenage material. I did Patsy Walker for many years, and the first time that Stan saw the material was when he saw the whole book. So we trusted each other and that worked very well. I’m sure he had that relationship with other people, but I didn’t work in the office. I was freelance after my associate editorship ended.

You did do a superhero book—a very unique take on the genre called Super Rabbit.

Yes.

How did that title come about? Was it an attempt to create your own superhero?

Stan Lee handed it to me as he handed a lot of things to me. I guess I had established that relationship on the first thing, Swat Car Squad, and from that point on, he would say to me, “create some characters and write it.” That’s what happened with Silly Seal and Ziggy Pig and Fertie the Fox and so many others. And then when the writer/artist who was doing Super Rabbit—I don’t exactly know who that was—he called me in and he said, “how would you like to write and draw this thing?” And I said, “sure, great.”

From the beginning, I just realized that I couldn’t do a rabbit as a superhero. It’s ridiculous. So it’s got to be a rabbit who has problems. So, right from the beginning, I just started writing stories where he was a second-rate superhero. He had just ordinary problems. That’s why I sort of tie it into what Stan started doing with superheroes, later on. Although I’m not taking any credit away from Stan Lee. He’s perfectly creative in his own right, and I have absolute faith the fact that he was not influenced by Super Rabbit. He probably didn’t even remember Super Rabbit when he did his superhero stuff. But it was just a very funny coincidence that I did have Super Rabbit have ordinary problems like human beings have, and being a superhero was not something that he was very successful at.

So when you look at Spider-man or the Fantastic Four, you see a little bit of Super Rabbit in there?

Well, in a way I do. I think it sort of makes me feel things come full circle. The writers of superhero material—Captain America and the Human Torch and the Submariner—were very straight. They took this stuff very seriously. They were fighting the war and they were fighting Nazis and fighting the Communists and all of these menaces, but they weren’t kidding around. The only jokes they’d have would be something like, “take that, you half-assed…thing…”

Taglines.

Taglines, yeah. And hitting five people with the same punch. But not much, other than these little throwaway bits of humor. and then Stan, to his credit, turned things around and he I think he turned the industry around by making superheroes more a part of our world than just from some distant planet. And he combined superheroes with human traits and I think that people could identify with that stuff more easily.

Could you see yourself having written those more serious superhero books, had things turned out differently, if you would have stayed on with Timely as it became Marvel?

Well I must confess that I think I could have written superhero material. Stan even assigned me a straight writing job on one of this detective books. I forget what the title was, but I did a sort off Bonnie and Clyde thing. I wrote it and I drew it. I felt very comfortable with it. I feel that writing is writing. If you have to do a serious thing, you do a serious thing. If you have to do something that’s funny, you do something that’s funny. I’m not going to say that I would have had a hugely successful career as a superhero writer. I really don’t know. When you get into these things, you get familiar with the problems of the craft and you start to get used to it.

I really don’t think it would have been difficult for me, but I like drawing and I can’t draw straight stuff. Even teenage drawing was difficult for me, but I did it well enough so that the books sold well. That’s all I know. The drawing might not have been so great, but it did the job. I think most of us, at the end of our lives would like to start over again and see how things would have gone if we had gone in another direction, but we don’t get that chance.

[Concluded in Part Three]

–Brian Heater

“I was trying shut the radio off and had type flying in the air,” Al Jaffee laughs, taking the call off of speakerphone. He’s in the middle of fold-in at the moment—“engrossed” as he happily puts it. It is, of course, exactly what one would expect the artist to be working on at 5:30 PM on a Wednesday night—or, really, any time, for that matter. Since 1964, the artist has created, by his estimation, more than 400 of the things, which have graced the back cover of all but three issues of Mad Magazine over the course of the past 45 years.

At 87, Jaffee’s speaks of himself in the same self-deprecating tones his fans have come to know and expect from his work, a sense of modesty that hardly betrays his position as one of the most beloved humor cartoonists of the past half-century.  The artist is quick with joke for nearly every topic we broach during our discussion, though the one that inadvertently kicks off the interview hits a little too close to home—the death rattle of the American publishing industry.

In late January of this year, it was announced that Mad, America’s premier humor magazine, will become a quarterly, after 55 years as a monthly publication. It is, of course, a sign of the times, if ever their were one, a sign that the magazine is continuing to struggle at the hands of newer forms of media, seven years after finally caving and including advertisements in its printed form. It’s also a sign, Jaffee adds, half jokingly, that “humor is dying.”

Pop cultural bemoaning aside (though, honestly, who can blame the guy?), Jaffee proves himself once again to be the consummate storyteller, a man with a fantastic yarn for nearly every question one might toss at him, from his days attending classes at The High School of Music & Art in New York alongside future Mad staffers Harvey Kurtzman, Al Feldstein, and Will Elder; to his time spent as an artist/writer for Stan Lee at Timely Comics; to creation of some of Mad’s most enduring features. Few have seen as much of the industry as Al Jaffee an even fewer can tell its story quite so well.

Is the fold-in that you’re working on for the next issue of Mad?

No, actually, I’m working on a fold-in for Squa Tront. That’s a publication, that I think is funded by Fantagraphics, but it’s run by Jerry Weist. That’s who I’m working with. But it’s just a special for one issue.

Have your fold-ins largely been created for Mad, or have you done a lot for other publications?

I’ve done fold-ins on the outside commercially, but not for competeing humor magazines. I haven’t done anything—if there are any other humor magazines. I don’t know if there are.

Certainly not in the traditional magazine form.

Because humor is dying [laughs].

There’s a lot of comedy on the Internet, but it’s definitely a change from the age of the humor magazine.

The Internet has changed the world. Everything is different now. Newspapers have to contend with it, magazines—as a matter of fact, I get The New York Times. I’ve been getting it every morning for years, and now more and more of the Internet is creeping into the newspaper, because they don’t see the future on newsprint alone. So, every article you read ends with, “for more news on this subject, go to NewYorkTimes.com.” And here I am paying for the newspaper, and I’m only getting part of the story, because they have to tie in with the Internet.

The “fit” part of “All the news that’s fit to print slogan” doesn’t seem so appropo.

Well, things change. Nothing stays the same. Mad is different this year, too. From 12 issues a year, we’re down to four.

How has that affected you? I imagine it’s freed up some time to work on different projects.

It does, but at the same time, the immediate effect is to practically cut out my income from Mad. Four-fifths of my income from Mad is gone, and who knows how long that will last.

Are you doing work for the site, specifically?

They haven’t quite figured out how that’s going to run, and so far there hasn’t been a budget allocated for it. I’d be interested in doing fold-ins on the ‘net, but it has to be something that pays off for them and pays off for me.

You’ve always been a pioneer in terms of the use of the page. I imagine that, had you come of age in the time of the Internet, than you’d probably be doing similarly innovative work in that format.

Yeah, you know, I’m just too old for that. I’m from another time. I think the stuff we do at Mad is pertinent and people seem to enjoy it—the fold-ins that I do and sometimes other things. But the Internet is just a different ball game. It’s more immediate. I’ve seen fold-ins done on the Internet—my fold-ins—and they actually come off better than they do in the magazine, because you fold it electronically, and it’s quicker and easier and more precise. The timing is very good. In the magazine, when you read the question, and then you have to spend ten minutes folding it to get the answer,  it works much better when you read the first part of it and then you look at the picture and with one click, you’ve got the thing folding. It’s much more interesting, really. I don’t mean to knock my own work in the magazine—I think the magazine still works very well—but I think the new technology is faster and I think young people like you today, have a lot on your plate, and you want to get to more and things, every day.

I was fairly young when I first started reading Mad. I had small, clumsy hands—it was a bit difficult to do those fold-ins, the first couple of times.

It is, it is. It’s even difficult for me. But it wouldn’t have lasted all of these years, if people didn’t enjoy the result, once they’ve fiddled around with it and got the words to work out right and all of that. I guess you’ve got a little feeling of accomplishment, so I guess there’s a reward and I think that’s what made it work. But there was a time when there was a reward for sending smoke signals, instead of the telephone. The smoke signals died out when the telephone came in. I don’t know where fold-in is going to go, as far as print is concerned, but it may continue on in the Internet.

You’re definitely considered the owner of the idea, in a sense. Whenever people talk about fold-ins, they tend to attribute the concept to you. But is it something that you enjoy seeing other people do—the ways the execute it, either online or in print?

Well, you know, I don’t worry about things that I can’t control. And if there are people out there who think they can do fold-ins better than I can, more power to them. That’s the nature of everything, whether it’s sports—If you’re a good pitcher in baseball and you’re watching a young player come along who’s better than you are, what are you gonna do, kill him [laughs]? You have to say, “hey, great.” I don’t worry about those things. I’ve always tried to do the best I could, an I always knew that there were a lot of cartoonists who were better than I was in certain areas. I mean, unquestionably in the area of drawing superheroes, almost everyone who does it is better than I am, but that’s just not my field of expertise, and I like to believe that the things that I was good at all of these years—and I hope that I’m still good at—I’m proud of my stuff and happy with what I did. But that doesn’t mean that someone isn’t going to come along who is going to be better and do even more exciting stuff, and good luck to him.

The fold-in is an especially interesting case—it was originally conceived as a one-off.

Yeah. It was just a one-shot. A lot of stuff that appeared in Mad was just a one-time gag. Even Alfred E. Newman, who I think Harvey Kurtzman picked up out of some kind of old magazine. He’d been around since the middle of the 19th century. Harvey picked him up because he fit perfectly into an idea that he had to do a satirical version of the old snake oil kind of advertising that was done in the back of old comic books. If you’ve ever seen old comic books from the 1930s and 40s, the whole back page would be advertising whoopee cushions, sneezing powder, how to develop muscles, pulling on some kind of rubber thing—

Charles Atlas—

The Atlas thing, yeah. So Harvey wanted to do a takeoff on that. He wanted to do a funny face, and this old Afred E. Newman face fit perfectly, so he picked it up. They weren’t going to do another back cover doing the same idea. That was supposed to be the end of it. But when Al Feldstein took over Mad after Harvey Kurtzman, he felt that Mad needed a mascot the way that some other magazines had done. Esquire had a character named Esky, and Playboy has the Playboy rabbit, and The New Yorker had the guy with the top hat and the butterfly. And so Feldstein, who really had a better sense of what sells magazines, was interested in that. He said, “let’s have someone make a good painting of this and let’s use it as a mascot.” He got Norman Mingo to do it, and it’s been successful ever since. It gave Mad an identity for the last 50 years or so.

But lots of things that come along are just one-shots. I did something called Hawks and Doves, which was supposed to be a one-shot. I was just having a little fun with the whole anti-war business, having Doves be a peace-lover, and he’s getting his rocks off with the major who is for the war. I was playing with that as a one-shot gag and Feldstein liked it, and he asked me to do some more. The same thing happened with the fold-in. I came up with one idea and figured it was just a one-shot gimmick. I didn’t even have an idea for another one. So Feldstein and Gaines both asked me to do some more, so I got to work on it. and it just went on and one and one for the last 45 years.

Do you know how many you’ve done in total?

Well, I’ve done over 400. Mad is celebrating it’s 500th issue anniversary. I’ve been in every one but three since 1964. I think I’ve done about 405 or something like that.

When the magazine was monthly, was that fold-in deadline ever something that you dreaded? Was it tough to get them in every issue.

No, I didn’t mind at the beginning, I did all of the ideas myself. I did that for a number of years. I came up with the idea and the sketch and showed it to them. It was not easy to get something approved, but I struggled along when I was younger and stronger and had more energy and put work into the latenight hours, until I succeeded. In later years, especially after Feldstein left, there were two editors, Nick Meglin and John Ficarra. They preferred to call in all of the associate editors and kick around ideas, so they would be on top of things, and they started coming up with stuff that was much more current, especially dealing with celebrities.

[Continued in Part Two]

–Brian Heater