[Left to Right: Arnold Roth, Gary Groth, and Al Jaffee]

Of course it takes a special occasion to get Art Spiegelman, Adriane Tomine, Evan Dorkin, Bob Fingerman, R. Sikoyak, and a handful of fellow New York comics luminaries to forgo the warmth of their respective burroughs, braving the mid-April drizzle to sit amongst The Strand bookstore’s folding chairs.

For his part, Fantagraphics head honcho Gary Groth flew in from the publisher’s home in the scenic northwest to emcee the event—a celebration of Humbug Magazine’s rerelease in the form of two hardbound volumes, the first time the short-lived humor magazine has seen the light of day since its original year-long run in the late-50s.

Groth was flanked by two of the medium’s all-time greats—Al Jaffee and Arnold Roth, who, along with Harvey Kurtzman, Will Elder, and Jack Davis formed formed the principle cast of Humbug, Kurtzman’s “adult” satire magazine formed in the wake of his exit from Mad and the subsequent immediate folding of the Hugh Hefner-back Trump.

It was the late-Elder, however, who took center stage at the top of the event, in the form of an as-of-yet unfinished documentary directed and screen by the artist’s son-in-law, Gary VandenBergh. The filmmaker thanked his family, seated directly in the front of the projector screen and fired up the short film, only to postpone it so after, thanks to DVD-related technical difficulties.

Roth, Groth, and Jaffee picked up where the film left off, seated behind a trio of mics and copies of the new book, recounting the brief ups and downs of Humbug. Groth happily took a backseat during the proceedings, seated between two natural born storytellers and consummate humorists. The duo talked Mad and Playboy and Stan Lee and the insane genius of their fellow cartoonist. The chat, sadly, was fairly short-lived, lasting around half-an-hour, audience questions included.

Things wrapped up shortly after, with the final scenes from the Elder documentary. The night was short, funny, and fascinating–in all a fairly fitting tribute to the magazine it was meant to honor.

[Full Audio of the Event]

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[More Videos]

Interview with Al Jaffee Partts One, Two, and Three

Interview with Arnold Roth Parts One, Two, and Three

–Brian Heater

In this final part of our interview with legendary cartoonist Arnold Roth, we discuss the his work creating covers for jazz LPs for artists like Dave Brubeck, his relationship with novelist John Updike, his connection to PG Wodehouse, and why not working for Playboy means you don’t want to live.

[Part One]
[Part Two]

You’ve done a lot of LP covers, primarily for jazz groups.

And even for classical people, but they were funny covers. I did one for Glenn Gould, who was a great concert composer.

Do you listen to the record much before you create the cover?

Oh no. a lot of times they were recording or hadn’t quite recorded, and they wanted to set up the printing or save the time. No, I never heard any of the music, but of course they were successful musicians, so generally I knew what they did and how they did it. But a lot of times the idea would key more toward—like Glenn Gould, it was an album of stuff that he had conducted with the orchestra. I remember I did a drawing of the orchestra, with Glenn Gould in the front conducting and everybody playing in the orchestra was Glenn Gould. So I drew Glenn Gould about 80 times [laughs]. I don’t know if they ever saw that.

You did a few book covers for John Updike, as well.

I did three. The Bech books. I enjoyed that very much. It was a lot of fun to do. And he knew that I would have to do the ideas, and whatever I sent to him, he liked and it went right through.

Was that a situation where you had the text in front of you before you drew the cover?

Yes, yes, because what they were were actually collections of short stories, most of which had run in different publications. They were always about this one writer, Henry Bech. A lot of things that I’ve done as an illustrator, writing humor, whatever, the piece that is involved is accomplished already. But I would say that, 70-percent, over the years, maybe more, had not been writen yet, because I did a lot for Time, Fortune, and it goes on and on. But they knew what the subject was. Of course, I keep to the subject, I don’t illustrate anything in the story. So, whatever the editors could tell me. If they had a title or a subtitle, fine, but they would say, “this is about a guy who lived in Moscow for 10 years.” That’s enough to get started. And like I say, the way I think, the sort of ideas I do, I can just pull it out of the air. But it will relate to the piece, naturally, because the setting or whatever fits. If it’s about a guy 10 years in Moscow, you knew you would see Moscow and the sky. That would connect to something funny about Russia, or whatever.

Was the work that you did for Playboy primarily strip or illustration-based?

No, I did a lot of illustration for them, but I did do a history of sex for them. That was in the 70s, when things had really blown wide open [laughs]. And it was a lot of fun to do, because imagine you’re gonna sit down and make up a history of sex. Everything is possible, and it was in there [laughs]. So, yeah, I even started with the dinosaur age for chapter one. One thing that happened is, Michelle Urri, now, unfortunately the late-Michelle Urri who was great—she was their cartoon editor. When I got to the ancient Greeks, I got two chapters. They were usually three or four pages. She called me up and said, “how long is this history going to go on?” And I said, “as long as I’m paying tuition!” A year later I called her up and, “Michelle, I have great news for you—both of my sons dropped out” [laughs]. She started to worry that they weren’t going to be educated. And, of course, they’re both still working in the rock and roll world. They’re both terrific musicians.

Did you feel a certain sort of stigma, when you first started working for Playboy?

Oh no. Although I lived in England for one year. When I sold the feature to The Herald Tribune, and I was starting to get lots of magazine commissions, I paid off all my debts in a year, because I had borrowed money from people to put into Humbug. And they included the Fantasy Record guys, Paul Desmond—people who had money. And since I had this steady thing of doing the syndicated feature, my wife and I decided we could go live in England, which we had always wanted to do. I guess I had been to Canada once, but I had never really been out of the country.  So our boys were very young—they were two and four. We went and I thought we would be there for at least two years, but when they folded my feature, it turned out to be one year.

Now, that had to do with the question you had asked [laughs]. Of course, when I was there, I met tons of British cartoonists. You go to the cartoonist pubs and they’re there. They would say, “how can you work for Playboy?” Of course they had all seen it [laughs]. They felt it was not degenerate, but a low kind of thing to work for. I asked, “are you against anything Playboy stands for?” Because they print nude photos of women. “Oh no, no,” they didn’t want to be Puritanical. So, everything I asked them, I said “are you against this, are you against that?” So a lot of them became regular contributors. But I think it was just because everybody considered it to be low.

It’s like, I lived in Princeton for many years, and I would go to cocktail parties and someone would say, “I understand you do drawings for Playboy Magazine,” but they would say it in this derogatory way. And I would say, “yes,” and they would say, “well, isn’t that sort of…you know…” and I would say, “they were the first major American magazine to come out against open air nuclear testing.” And one guy, when I said it to him, he said, “well, sure, if anybody would want to live, it would be those guys” [laughs]. So that was one of my test questions on the list, “do you want to live?”  If somebody didn’t want to work for Playboy, my first question would be, “do you want to live?”

So Hefner was pretty good to the cartoonists he employed?

I thought he was great. See, my deal was that I would do the work, and that’s how it would have to run, if they wanted me to work for them.

No editorial input.

Yeah, but he was a nitpicker. He wanted to be a cartoonist when he was young. He loves cartooning. They always had the obvious burlesque joke, but I think Michelle was running far superior cartoons to the New Yorker, for a long time.

They had Jack Cole—

Jack Cole, they had Francis Smilby, Eldon Dedini, oh gee, just a ton of excellent cartoonists. [John] Dempsey—Dempsey could draw dirty minded middle-aged people better than anyone [laughs].

Looking back on all of these various publications you’ve worked for, is there one you can point to as a favorite?

Oh yeah. I had a really great and fortunate route. I say because of my “demands,” but I didn’t demand it, I just went in and said, “the way I work best is to not do sketches.” They all went along with me. But the real romance of my career was Punch. To begin with, I replaced PG Wodehouse—the novelist and movie writer. He was like 90-something. He would do the “American Report.” I was doing lot of full-page joke. On one of our visits—I think Kennedy was still alive, it was like ’63 or something. And they said, PG Wodehouse is the reporter on America, which we run two pages a month. They said, “he really doesn’t do any work. He cuts out oddities from The New York Daily News and pastes them up together. Would you do the report? “ I said, “yeah.” My head blew up.

When we came back to Princeton, I wrote two pages, which I was sure were the funniest pages about the American news ever written in the English language. And by return mail, I got my pages back and written in red at the top was, ‘you fool! I meant draw two pages!’ “Draw” was underlined. My wife brought me the mail and said, they’re really angry at you. Look, they call you a fool.” And I said, “listen, in England, if they don’t call you at least a swine, they’re not even serious.” So I drew two pages and I did it for another 20 years or more.

–Brian Heater

Since first launching his career six decades ago, Arnold Roth has become one of the best know and most beloved cartoonists of the 20th century. His work has appeared on the cover of Time and in the pages of virtual every well-known American publication, from The New Yorker to Sports Illustrated to Playboy to The New York Times.

Of course, the cartoonist had to pay his dues, just like the rest of us. In this second part of our interview with the artist, we dig into Roth’s early career, before The New Yorker, before Playboy—even before Humbug and Trump—to discover how he went from being expelled from a Philadelphia commercial arts college to becoming one of the most celebrated cartoonists working today.

[Part One]

What was the strangest job you had when you were attempting to establish yourself as an artist?

This take s a few words of background, but I was expelled from art school in 1948, to give you a time frame. I started freelancing in ’51. I’d been involved in some other failed ventures for television. They were good ideas, where I was the writer—we were producing a lot of ideas for General Baking’s Bond Bread, which I don’t even know if it exists now. But it was huge back then.

But nobody owned a television [laughs]. That was in 1948. Very few people had bought televisions yet. They were pretty primitive. So when I started freelancing, I shared a studio, which was a largish room right near where the Liberty Bell used to hand in Independence Hall. And there were 10 or 11 other guys, and we shared the $11 rent [laughs]. You’ll never see a rent check that low for anything anymore. So this guy came in and said he’d been sent in by this teacher who I knew hated me, at the art school. It turns out this guy was from a notable Philadelphia family, but it turned out that he owned two nudist colonies [laughs]. The nudists would buy anything about nudists. I did some gag cartoons about nudism for cocktail napkins, drinking glasses, etc. etc. of course I was very poorly paid.

They didn’t have pockets to keep their money in.

And for all I know, they still make them and sell them [laughs]. Then I had a silkscreen company. I did Pennsylvania Dutch Hex signs. Somebody told me that they recently saw one. It was all color separation work. That was the sort of thing that I got. And then things were building. I’d get jobs like that, but more and more people would come to me as they’d see my work. Of course in Philadelphia there was TV Guide. They knew I had a reputation for being reliably on time and the work had quality, I guess. But it takes a while, and you have to do an awful lot of cheap jobs. But, on the other hand, it was earning while you’re learning—earning very little while you’re learning a lot. Mostly about not working for little.

Why were you expelled from art school?

Well, I went into art school along with all the GIs, after the second World War. The had the GI Bill, which was a great idea. I came directly from high school. I graduated high school in ’46. The war had ended the summer before. All of these ex-GIs in the art school I went to, they were frantically putting up buildings to have art classes. So I had a scholarship from the Philadelphia public schools’ board of education. But I also played saxophone—I still do. I was gigging so that I could make money. And I liked it, too. I had a tendency to be late to school, practically every day. You know at most art schools it’s when you show up and when you leave that they care about, but this was very much that you had be there at nine, and there was a lunch break. It was strict that way. The same school is now called The University of the Arts, and it’s huge in Philadelphia. So I tended to be late and casual.

I wasn’t angry that they kicked me out, and I sure wasn’t surprised. They put me on probation after the first year. I figured, it’s their school. But that particular regime was very strict, as I say, and the last they needed was a scholarship student, because the government was paying for everybody else, so it wasn’t a difficult decision. Although years later, a fellow who became my brother in law, a printmaker named Jerry Kaplan, had been at the faculty meeting where they had decided to expel me, and he said that this one woman teacher walked in and said, “before we talk about anything, I want to talk about this boy, Arnold Roth. When he came to this school, he was a genius, but he has not improved.” That’s a strict school [laughs].

So, anyway, we parted ways. But since then they’ve given me every honor. I’ve had two one-man shows, etc. they’ve been very nice to me [laughs]. Of course, they were very different regimes. Oh, by the way, the regime that expelled me, they expelled at least one person every year, for about ten years, and every one of the people that they expelled not only stayed in the art world, but they became very well know in their particular field. Irving Penn, the photographer is the only one I can remember, but I used to be able to rattle them off. In a way, I kind of felt bad for the faculty, but to hell with them [laughs].

Was cartoon something that was frowned up in art school in those days?

Nobody that I knew of—maybe School of Visual Arts, if they were going by that time—taught such a thing. My major in commercial art, they had advertising and commercial art. They went through all forms. It was basically a commercial art school, but you were given all of the same things you would learn in a fine art school, painting, drawing. You were given a traditional background. It was a very good school. They still turn out excellent students. But there was no course in cartooning.

Remember, this was in the late-40s—I never knew why anyone would go to school to learn cartooning, per se. Because here I was playing jazz and to me they still are very similar exercises. You learn to be a jazz player by listening to jazz. You didn’t learn to play your horn. That was the way things worked. If you went to art school and became a cartoonist, you learned to be an artist. But you would apply it to cartooning. Same thing with jazz. People would go to Julliard and end up in the jazz world.

Did that traditional fine arts education have an impact on your cartooning?

Oh yeah. I started going to art classes when I was about eight-years-old. It was the end of the depression before the start of the second World War. They had stuff available for little kids, and because of the depression, the best artists in the city were teaching eight-year-olds. And I would go to classes Sautrday mornings. I’d go to the Philadelphia Art Museum and took printmaking there. We actually did real lithographs on real limestones. We learned everything about it, and here were the finest printmakers in Philadelphia teaching the class. Everybody needed the bread. And then in the afternoon, there were two brothers name Fleischer who were interested in art. They had bought a Catholic monestary, right in the heart of Little Italy. They converted it into an art school. They maintained the cathedral as a museum. It was loaded with statues, etc. it was perfectly free. So I would go there in the afternoon and there we drew in pastel. It was academic training and it was very valuable, but it’s like when you buy a saxophone, you don’t have to have someone teach you to play it.

You mentioned earlier that cartooning and playing jazz are very similar exercises, and of course plenty of people have compared fine art to jazz, in terms of improvisation, et al. Do you feel as if those two disciplines greatly affected one another in your life?

Sure. One thing, you have the confidence knowing that you can handle your materials and realize the ideas that come to you. But then you have that freedom of what you think of to draw and play. But with the training, you notice that someone who can really play will usually be a better jazz player than someone who is fumbling along because they’re more restricted.

Do you often put on jazz in the background when you’re drawing?

Yeeah. But I listen a lot of classical, but of course there’s only one station now in New York. If I have to really write something, I don’t really play the music. I’ve worked with writers and they say, “oh, you’re so lucky, you can listen to music when you’re working.” But if I’m really writing, say a really important letter, I don’t listen to music. That’s the penalty of listening to music that you like. It starts getting interesting and takes your mind off of what you’re doing.

Will you listen to different genres of music, depending on what you’re drawing?

Oh no. depending on what sort of stuff they’re playing on the radio. It’s all good. It becomes recessive. My mind isn’t on the music. I’m hearing it and enjoying it, but my mind is on the work I’m doing.

Do you think the manner of music you’re listening to can subconsciously affect the work you’re doing?

I think at various times, if I was listening and they were playing a very bright tempo, I would cross hatch faster or something. But no, when I really got to the vital parts of the piece, then the music would receed.

[Concluded in Part Three]

–Brian Heater

Fantagraphics’ new two book Humbug set marks the first time that the long-defunct magazine’s material has been pulled together into a single collection.  Forty years after its initial publication, the magazine has largely been forgotten by all but the most devout cartooning fans. Its founders Harvey Kurtzman, Jack Davis, Al Jaffee and Will Elder, however, should be familiar to all of those who have a passing knowledge of that perennial favorite humor magazine, Mad. Jaffee, Davis, and Elder all followed Kurtzman as the editor made the jump from Mad to Hugh Hefner’s newly launched humor magazine, Trump.

After two issues, however, Trump’s increasing expenses and Hefner’s own economic troubles resulted in the closure of that magazine. Along the way, however, the four Mad refugees added yet another creative cartooning force to the team—a young Philadelphian named Arnold Roth. It was with Roth, funds culled together by the five artists, and some residual Hefner office space that Humbug was born.

Humbug, too folded quickly, completing a paltry print run of 11 issues. Roth, however, would go on to a diverse and successful career illustrating for Playboy; creating his own syndicated strip, Poor Arnold’s Almanac; designing album art for Dave Brubeck; and drawing book covers for John Updike.

We sat down with the artist, a month after his 80th birthday, to discuss Humbug and his early forays into the world of cartooning.

The new Fantagraphics book is really the magazine’s first real collection.

Well, yeah. I don’t know how major of a publication it really was. You’d never think that from our sales. As the story goes, the figures that we go on sales were not reliable and never were going to be. But at any rate, yes. It’s all due to Gary Groth’s keen dedication and interest.

What’s the story behind the numbers?

They wanted us to do Cracked every other month, and of course we didn’t want to. That’s how we eventually decided that we had to fold. But the sales figures come from the distributors. Whatever they say they are, that’s what they are. You can’t argue. Since they wanted us to make that deal with them, we were never going to break even. Our sales came tantalizingly close to breaking even, but whatever number they wanted to give us, that’s what they were doing. We knew it. that’s the way business runs. So finally we had a showdown meeting and we just decided to go out of business.

What was the hesitation, as far as working on Cracked?

Well, we were owners of Humbug. There were five of us. But Cracked would be the product of the distributor and we would be doing it for free for them, every other month, just to stay in business—for all intents and purposes. We never actually talked about what the payment arrangement would be. I don’t think we would have been over payed in that situation [laughs]. So, we just decided to fold.

For lack of a more tactful way of putting it, Cracked always sort of struck me as something of a second-tier Mad. Was that the feeling at the time?

Yeah. That’s what it was. That’s very usual in magazines—well, in movies and everything. Somebody has a hit and everybody has an imitation. Hefner used to be very brilliant when discussing this, because his magazine had a lot of imitations, too. It’s like clothing lines. Somebody brings out a dress suit with short pants, so every suit company says, “well, people who liked that will buy from us, too.”

Kurtzman and Jaffee had come over from Mad. Was part of the driving force of Humbug a desire to do something different than what they had done on that magazine?

Well, not necessarily. Willie Elder and Jack Davis, of course—I was the only one who hadn’t, come to think of it. That was the appeal of the work, mining that particular vein in that particular way. But Harvey’s idea was to make it less high school and more college. And of course we all agreed that would be fine. But they couldn’t make too drastic a change, because that what the appeal was—these are the people that had been doing Mad. They had invented it, actually.

Were you a reader of Mad before you signed on with Humbug?

Yes. I didn’t know about it for a while. I had heard it mentioned. I knew the Dave Brubeck group. We had met by happenstance. Paul Desmond I think read everything that was being printed in every form [laughs]. They did a lot of traveling, so he had lots of time. He told me about it. I went to the newsstand, and of course it was there and selling like crazy by that point. I would say that it would have been about a year since it first came out. I thought it was great, of course—which it was. It was exactly what I wanted to do in my career, that sort of thing.

Was Humbug your first steady work as a cartoonist?

Well, no, I had been on retainer to Trump, which went out of business before it hit the stands. That’s when we said, since we’re altogether and since Hefner was giving us office space—he was very contrite and disappointed about what had happened. He heart was into Trump—as were ours [laughs]. Of course on Humbug I was spending money—we were all partners and putting money into it. I think the only other times I’ve gotten a regular check for doing work was when I had a syndicated feature with The Herald Tribune. And then a revival of that, 30 years later. That was Poor Arnold’s Almanac.

That was after Humbug?

It was after we folded. Al sold a feature. They had a very good comics editor. It was almost completely a writer’s syndicate. They had a few comics and the newer ones were BC by Johnny Hart and Mel Lazarus’s Miss Peach, which was very good also. It was sort of like Peanuts in a way, with bright little kids saying sophisticated things. But they had a few old time things that they kept alive. I think one was called Mr. And Mrs. I can’t rattle them off. So Al sold them Tall Tales and I sold them Poor Arnold’s Almanac, which ran two years. It was a Sunday only, which was why they canceled me. They wanted a daily. They said it makes the Sunday feature stronger. The Sunday feature was doing—not great, but well enough for me to make money.  At that time I was living in England and my magazine work and record album was was starting. I wasn’t in great haste to do a daily. But during one of my many moves, when I cam back, I found that I had penciled a stack of dailies, but I was never going to ink them. I didn’t want to get too locked up in the syndicate thing.

Because you had so much work on the side?

Yeah. And I really enjoyed the magazine work more. And I eventually ended up where most of my business was illustrating for magazines. I did a lot of comic stuff that I would write. I liked the humor and eventually I did “The American Report” for Punch for two pages, and that went on for about 25 years. I worked for them for 30 years. I started to do a lot for Sports Illustrated, and I would do features and spreads and Esquire and TV Guide. There were lots of magazines that I did lots of illustrating for. The way I illustrate is I try to have something humorous in the illustration. It’s not just a drawing of something in the story.

You must have considered doing a daily earlier on. That was sort of the dominant forum for cartoonists in those days.

Yeah. Well, it was one of the most lucrative fields for cartoonists, if you made a hit. It was the ultimate realization of capitalism. You only did it once and you were getting paid many times, depending on the number of newspapers. That was fine. That’s an industry, comics, and it’s a hell of a job. And doing the same thing every day—I don’t know how they don’t all become drunken hatchet murderers [laughs]. A lot become drunks, but they don’t become violent. Which is why they had to eventually get assistants, to keep the quality of the work up and make it good.

How did you get involved in Trump, initially?

I believe it was Ed Fischer, The New Yorker gag cartoonist who I was friends we. He mentioned it. I don’t know if I had already done drawings for Playboy. But Ed told me that they were starting this publication. And I hadn’t met any of the people involved. I lived in Philadelphia, so I would go to New York frequently to push my stuff. I’d go to magazines and show them my sample book, etc, etc. By that time I had already done fairly steady work for TV Guide and occasional work for Esquire. I was already selling to major markets. And of course album covers were a very good field for me. And I was even doing stuff for an animation place called Storyboard, which John Hubley owned. He was one of the three people who did Gerald McBoing-Boing.

With Gene Deitch.

That’s it. Gene Deitch was working inside at Storyboard. So they were using two freelancers that I knew of and they sort of added me on the fringe [laughs]. When they would add me when they got certain commissions to do ideas for them. But I never actually did the animation. I might have designed something for Old Gold Cigarettes.

Back when you could do cartoons for cigarettes.

Yes [laughs]. I still smoke. 80-years-old and I still smoke. That shows you how smart I am. That was a good account for me, at that time. By that time I was already rolling. By the mid-50s, I could see that that would be my career. I started freelancing in ’51. Of course, as usually happens, I was the only one who knew that’s what I was doing. I would do local work in Philly–$10 a drawing. Even in those days that was not a lot.

[Continued in Part Two]

–Brian Heater

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

Released earlier this week by The New Press, Brown professor Paul Buhle’s Jews in American Comics could have easily been yet another rehash of a long line of academic treatises on the subject of Jewish-American involvement in the creation of the superhero, most recently exemplified by Danny Fingeroth’s Superman Disguised as Clark Kent.

Fortunately for us, however, Buhle considers himself something of a peer to artists like Robert Crumb and Art Spiegelman. A spiritual descendant of Harvey Kurtzman and his ilk, the realm of capes and tights never really did all that much for the author.

Instead, the book maps the role of Jewish creators from the early days of syndicated comics through the innovations brought forth by EC/MAD, and ultimately through the explosion of the underground and its subsequent repercussions.

For a more complete review of the book, check the most recent issue of The New York Press. After the jump you’ll find a full—if short—interview conducted with Buhle for the publication.

What sort of history do you have, writing academically about comics?

I would say modestly—I began by publishing Radical American Comics in Madison, in 1969, which is the third of the underground comics to appear. The first two were Crumb’s Zap Comics solos. Then, in the 70s, I published a theoretical version of a fanzine called Cultural Correspondance—1975 to 1983. That is digitized now. In the 90s, I wrote a fair bit about Spiegelman and Ben Katchor, my pal, and any number of artists, some of whom I interviewed in the 70s for Cultural Correspondence, The Village Voice, The Nation, and any number largely Jewish publications.

Leaping forward to 2003, I had a piece in the Chronicle of Higher Education about how comics have now become a subject of academic interest. That was much circulated and much—not exactly attacked—but everyone whose name wasn’t mentioned was crabby about it, you understand. There wasn’t much of a scholarly trail then, and anyone who published an online magazine that has since gone out of business thought that he deserved an important mention.

I have another scholarly piece in Reviews in American History and another piece in Marxism Reexamined and a number of other journals. I’ve tried to do two things at once: establish a sort of scholarly dignity for non-fiction comics and recover what non-fiction has done in the past, like this guy, Jack Jackson, who did a history of pre-state Texas and was highly regarded by the Texas historical society, before he died, a few years back. Also at the same time, I’ve tried to suggest what could be done now, and why it was important to do comics on valuable subjects, without being didactic, because that follows the track of my students who read less every year—and many of them want to read comics.

You seem to largely take as your focus alternative cartoonists like Crumb. Is that a direct result of having come out of that tradition?

No, really, a lot of it is based on my growing up reading Mad comics, before it became Mad Magazine. When it became Mad Magazine, it wasn’t as good, but it was still sort of Jewish liberal and New York reaching out to me, in the middle of Illinois, which was appreciated, but also, Classics Illustrated, which we always called “Classic Comics.” That was the place I where I first read my classics. Since my sister, who is four years older, taught me how to read after kindergarten using those books, comics always had a really warm spot in my heart. Mad comics, because it was so wonderful about showing what was stupid and hypocritical about the coporate world, it was sort of like my book of knowledge. I wrote a high school paper as a junior about Harvey Kurtzman. I got a B from a teacher who liked me, but always thought that comics were degraded, as almost everyone did think.

I feel now that they have an exhaulted purpose that is only now beginning to be understood, and the comic artist, with the rarest exceptions—Spiegelman is almost the catchword, until Alison Bechdel came on the stage, and my new friend, Linda Barry-there are less than 10 that have ever been given the credit that they deserve. They’ve rarely been able to make a living. I think that I’m they’re champion, I would cheerfully say.

Is it a coincidence that the first person considered to have broken down that wall between academia and comics—Spiegelman—is a jew?

No, I don’t think it’s a coincidence. It’s a strange thing, and the very first underground comics full-scale exhibit will open in Madison, in April at the University of Wisconsin. I wrote the essay in the catalog, and I noted that, in the underground comics world of the Bay Area, Jewish comic artists were not numerous. They were there, but they were not numerous. That’s because it was not in greater New York, the way that the comic industry was. But that migration eastward, after that phase ended, circa-1980, suggested that, in the greater New York publishing world, that Jewish artists probably would have been the ones who would have written vastly disprortionate amounts, compared to the common artist.

You touch on the superhero books coming out of New York in a chapter, but don’t really dwell. Does it have anything to do with the fact that it’s a well-tread area?

That’s a really good question, and someone who criticizes me on that is probably well-founded, and I have no right to be crabby about it. I really stopped reading superheroes when I was about 12. I was a little too old to start reading Marvel in the 60s. I didn’t take to them. I didn’t think that they represented a new phase of art. The art seemed very stylized, and also, I have to say I was always looking for that progressive New Deal-ish message that always seems to be in Mad Magazine.

I found Sgt. Fury to be more the tone of comics, and I know that has changed in the last 20 years—I was just looking at a writer who said that the artists want to write critically about the Iraq War, but they find themselves strapped to publishers who are still in the “celebrate the conquering heroes” mode in the mainstream. Although that may be over in ways I can’t see, I feel that the world of underground comics is so much my generation. There are so many people among them who are very good friends of mine, including Crumb and Bill Griffith—the only one who could make it into the dailies—that these are the ones that my heart went to. Plus those people in mainstream get $300 a page, and they don’t even have to ink. They have health plans, unlike my pals who have none of those things and are scraping along. So again, I feel like I’m their champion.

How integral is that concept of being an underdog to the success of the Jewish role in comics?

I think it’s integral to comics from the very first moment they appeared in the daily press in the 1890s, and not particularly Jewish. But it’s also true that my late friends, the Hollywood blacklisted artists, when they found out that they couldn’t portray struggling workers related to unions, they found another underdog who they could truly sympathize with, whether it was Katherine Hepburn as a woman or a poor orphan and on and on—some of them ended up doing animal features, with the same kind of underdog attitude. Animation was full of the same thing—mice against cats, cats against humans. You’re littler, but you can take on the giant, if you’re more clever. That resonates in a lot of Jewish culture, especially Jewish culture that’s not connect with the merchant or the Rabbi, but is out of that circle of influence.

Fitting then that it’s targeted toward children, in so many cases.

Well, that’s right, too, of course. I suppose on our weak side, we all wanted to be Superman or for girls, Wonderwoman, but that’s the immature way out—”I want big muscles, so I can punch people out.” But, by the time you get to be 12 and you realize that you’re not gonna be one of those guys with big muscles, you’ve got to figure how else to get along in the world. Then you’ve got to use your wits, and again, that goes to a certain Jewish affect, which was there, is there, and, in my estimation, will go on being there, no matter what the income levels and all of the other things that go along with that.

–Brian Heater