Al used to think up all the ideas for his fold-ins, but that was when he prided himself on his astute reading of the Zeitgeist. Today he doesn’t really care to stay au courant with pop culture in order to produce relevant fold-ins. “I could,” he says, “but I’d rather be irrelevant.” To make up for this deficit, MAD’s editorial staff now provides Al with subjects for his fold-in. Does MAD want a swine-flu fold-in in which some pigs in swill turn into a Denny’s Grand Slam Breakfast with sausage, eggs, and bacon? Al, blissfully out of touch with both Denny and his breakfast, is happy to rise to someone else’s occasion. He doesn’t need to own the idea anymore; it’s the challenge and the work of the fold-in that he loves with an abiding, if ambivalent, passion.
Sam Viviano, who has tried his hand at creating fold-ins, is astounded by the multiple talents and variations Al brings to the endeavor. “He never repeats himself. His well never runs dry. His sense of color is always evolving so that he is finding new and more rascally touches to mislead the reader.” At eighty-nine, Al is content to limit his MAD work to six fold-ins a year and a “Snappy Answers” or two when the mood moves him.
Not surprisingly, MAD is on its way to becoming a zine in cyberspace. For the time being, the magazine depends upon other sites to promote the four issues it publishes each year, but that, according to Ficarra, is merely a transitional move. While MAD will continue to publish six print magazines a year for readers who like the traditional format, Ficarra has every intention of going digital. “MAD wants to be where the readers are, and the readers are digital. Subscribers will read the magazine online, and it will appear as an app on their iPods.”
Ficarra is already thinking about how to digitize a fold-in quickly, when needed for a rapid site positioning. “If we had a great idea for a fold-in,” he says, “Al, who is willing to work with technology, could do the heavy lifting, figuring out how to turn, for instance, a drone attack into a kid at the breakfast table eating his cereal.” Viviano has worked out the details: “He could overnight it to us, and we would give it to another artist to ink and color on the computer and get it out in a day. Al does a tremendous amount of noodling that would certainly be lost in this process. I hate to say it, but because of the Internet, expedience is more prized than polish.
“Others have tried,” says Viviano, “but no one yet has approached the thrilling and puzzling intricacy of ajaffee fold-in. Nobody ever will.” But should Al prove not to be immortal, Viviano feels certain that the fold-in will live on. “A lot of people have done fold-ins as an homage to Al, but they lose something that Al brings to the fold-in. He has this long history of creating wacky inventions, and the fold-in is a wacky invention. Anything we might do would be in deference to Al and influenced by Al, but a new fold-in artist would put his own mark on his work.”
The arc of Al’s career has followed the evolution of the magazine. MAD and Al arrived on the scene in the 1950s, just as the American notion of childhood was changing radically. When MAD started out it was subversive. In retrospect Al sees MAD’s life trajectory in human terms. “The magazine was a revolutionary college kid, then it had a pleasant middle age, and now it’s a snappier old coot, more representative of our current time.”
Due to a coincidence of longevity and talent, Al Jaffee has been with MAD magazine longer than anyone, staff or freelancer. He was there nearly from the beginning. In a sense he was there before the beginning; Harvey Kurtzman had his eye on Jaffee in high school. One might even say, at least in retrospect, that given his artistic gift, Al’s mad childhood seems to have led him inevitably to satire and to MAD. For more than fifty years he has spoken to the awkward social outcast and the nerd in every MAD reader. He knows their fears. He verifies their suspicions. Adults are bluffing. Politicians are lying. He, of all people, understands their feelings of alienation. Jaffee is our man from Mars, by way of Lithuania, suspended between two worlds, in a state of plausible impossibility.
His family was broken by the persistent emotional and physical traumas of Zarasai, yet Al survived and thrived. He is held aloft by his own determined good humor and by the perpetual blast of hot air escaping from all the balloons of pomposity he has punctured over his lifetime. Like Bugs Bunny, he, too, has managed to stay aloft all these years by not looking down.
Acknowledgments
THIS BOOK HAS BEEN a happy collaboration from start to finish, for which we would like to acknowledge our own good natures and decades-long friendship. But we did not work alone. Voices from the distant past in the form of Yiskor Books, the memoirs of Jews who lived in Zarasai at about the same time as Al, have added richness to our story. So have the meticulously detailed unpublished memoirs of Al’s brother Harry, portions of which his wife, Lenore, generously shared with us. The Yivo Institute was another source of historical information about Zarasai, but it would have been Hebrew to us, were it not for the translating skills of Rabbi Yehuda Kantor of Connecticut and Tova Lichtman of New York. Reference librarians at the Westport Public Library in Connecticut researched obscure American and European train and boat schedules.
Serendipity, in the form of a chance online encounter, put us in touch with Paul Hattori, a London businessman, cartoon collector, and director of LitvakSIG, Inc., an all-Lithuanian-Jewish data base devoted to family history and genealogy. To add to our good fortune, Mr. Hattori’s database specializes in the Zarasai region. He found more Jaffee relatives than Al ever knew he had, and was able to provide us with ships’ manifests detailing Al’s transatlantic comings and goings, and with obscure Nazi records that shed light, for the first time, on Mildred Jaffee’s fate.
We are also grateful to Danny Fingeroth, comic book writer and editor, for his expertise, and to colorists Ryan Flanders and Doug Thomson. We thank Michael Vassallo for his work unearthing examples of Al’s art from his early days at Timely Comics.
We were lucky that our energetic agent, Sandy Dijkstra, loved the proposal at first sight, as did our editor, Mauro DiPreta, whose thoughtful editing made this a better book. Ms. Dijkstra’s executive assistant, Elise Capron, was a marvel of courtesy and efficiency, as was HarperCollins associate editor Jennifer Schulkind. We are also indebted to art director Milan Bozic and designer Kate Nichols, both of whom devoted talent and time to the challenging task of integrating art and text.
Al’s wife, Joyce, and my husband, Larry, deserve far more than pro forma thanks for their “loving support.” There isn’t a word or illustration in this book that has escaped their critical attention.
The hyperbolic phrase “there would be no book were it not for so-and-so” is too often lavished upon individuals without whom there would, in fact, have been a book. But in our case, Al Jaffee’s Mad Life would not be were it not for the insight, encouragement, and nonstop gentle nagging of James Sturm, cartoonist and cofounder of the Center for Cartoon Studies in White River Junction, Vermont. Years ago James read this author’s profile of Al Jaffee in Provincetown Arts magazine and convinced us that the material was so compelling that it ought to be a book.
Copyright
AL JAFFEE’S MAD LIFE. © 2010 by Mary-Lou Weisman. New illustrations © 2010 by Al Jaffee.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
EPub Edition © AUGUST 2010 ISBN: 978-0-062-04250-7
For information address HarperCollins Publishers, 10 East 53rd Street, New York, NY 10022.
This book is not a MAD publication.
FIRST EDITION
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Weisman, Mary-Lou
Al Jaffee’s mad life / Mary-Lou Weisman ; illustrated by Al Jaffee.—1st ed.
p. cm.
1. Jaffee, Al.2. Cartoonists—United States—Biography. I. Jaffee, Al. II. Title.
PN6727. J355z94 2010
741.5’6973—dc22
[B]
2010005747
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* Nonkosher food.
† Wigs.
*Scrolls containing the first five books of the Hebrew scriptures.
*Strolling around.
*Jew-free.
*“Irinka, give tea.”
*Folk doctor.
†“He’s so pretty, like a gentile.”
*Dunker.
†“What a pleasure!”
*Carrying pots.
†Jewish elementary school.
*“Buy my little bagels, fresh bagels.”
*“Cry, my little town, cry.”
†Shame.
*“Ach, a stinking Ford.”
*“Oh, dear God, oh, dear God.”
*Hut.
*Demons.
*God with us.
*Man built like an ox; coarse, rude person.
†“Idik chertu, zhid.”
* Powerful person.
*“I’m going to cut your balls off.”
* Big shot.
†Jerk.
‡ Thief.
§ Crazy woman.
* Jewishness.
† Swayed while praying.
‡ Prayed.
*Bundle.
†Children.
*Mother.
†“Cry, my little town, cry.”
*Homemaker.
*Student.
*Throughout his school years, Wolf’s friends called him “Wolfie.” Years later, after he left the army, he adopted the name Will Elder. Al’s references to “Wolfie” as “Will” or “Willie” reflect this later circumstance.
*Excessively and unaesthetically decorated; overdone.
Al Jaffee's Mad Life Page 20