2023-04-13 07:00:00
Al Jaffee created the ” Fold-In as well as another classic, ” Snappy Answers to Stupid Questions “, during his 77-year career.
Al Jaffee, the famous cartoonist who created two essential sections of the magazine Madthe « Fold-In » et « Snappy Answers to Stupid Questions “, died Monday, April 10, reports the New York Times. He was 102 years old.
Jaffee’s granddaughter, Fani Thomson, has confirmed his death, saying it was due to a multi-system failure.
Al Jaffee has spent 77 years as a professional cartoonist, which is a Guinness World Record. He started working for Mad in 1955, three years after its creation, and its decision to end its career came when the long-running satirical magazine stopped publishing new items.
Born in Savannah, Georgia on March 13, 1921, Jaffee had a somewhat peculiar childhood. When he was six years old, his mother decided to bring him and his three younger brothers back to the shtetl in Lithuania from which she had emigrated. The trip was only supposed to last a month, but it turned into a six-year ordeal, with her parents fighting over custody of the children. While in Lithuania, Jaffee’s father started sending him comics from America, and that’s where his passion for comics was born.
Upon his return to the United States, Jaffee embarked on art and obtained a place in the inaugural class of the High School of Music and Art in New York (two of his classmates, William Gaines and Harvey Kurtzman, would later found late Mad). As a professional artist, Jaffe’s talent for parody and satire was apparent from one of his earliest characters: Inferior Manan obvious parody of Batman. Inferior Man was bought by comics giant Will Eisner, and Jaffee then worked for another big name, Stan Lee, for a while.
When Jaffee started collaborating with Mad, it was mainly as a screenwriter; at the time, he was also working on other projects, including a comic strip titled ” Tall Tales “. His creative breakthrough came in 1964, when he published his first ” Fold-In a brilliant back-cover idea that involved folding an illustration vertically and inward to reveal a new image and drop. For 55 years, Jaffee was the only person in Mad to draw the Fold-In ”, creating more than 500 and releasing its last in June 2020 (a little dark but sardonic on the end of Mad).
While the ” Fold-In showcased Jaffee’s drawing and writing skills, ” Snappy Answers to Stupid Questions (which Jaffee launched in 1965) was all about humor. In an interview (originally published in Mike Sacks’ book, And Here’s the Kickerpublished in 2009, and of which a longer version was published in Vulture last month), Jaffee explained the origin of the column, saying it came to mind when he was trying to fix an antenna on the roof of his house: Suddenly I heard my son climbing the ladder. He asked me a question he asked every time he came home from school: “Where’s mum?”. I answered him: “I killed her and I throw her in this chimney”. He knew I was joking, of course, but I thought about it afterwards and figured there must be a million times a day we’re asked questions that we don’t know the answer to or which don’t make sense. On the roof, how could I have known where Mom was? »
Over the years, Al Jaffee has been widely praised for his work. He won numerous awards from the National Cartoonists society in the seventies and, in 2007, the industry’s highest accolade, the Reuben Award for Cartoonist of the Year.
During this interview with Mike Sacks, Jaffee came up with a joke that he could probably suspect would inevitably become the high point of at least one of his obituaries. He was asked to provide an answer to the stupid question: ” How do you think you will be remembered? »
The answer : ” Is there room on Mount Rushmore? »
Jon Blistein
Translated by the editor
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