Posted By Dan Greenfield on Mar 13, 2025 | 4 comments

Is this a birthday salute to the late Al Jaffee…?

By PAUL KUPPERBERG

Before becoming a Mad-man, Al Jaffee (March 13, 1921 – April 10, 2023) spent the first 15 years of his career as a Marvel-man, or more accurately, a Timely-man, on strips ranging from Waldo Wolf to Patsy Walker. Lots of Patsy Walker!

But something tells me Al Jaffee was always one of the world’s most interesting men. He was born in the U.S. in Savannah, Georgia, in 1921 before his mother took him and his brothers to live in a shtetl (a Jewish ghetto) in her native Lithuania in 1927, then returned home to America to live with his father in New York.

He attended the city’s High School of Music and Art where he made met friends and colleagues he would know for their entire lives, including Will Elder, Harvey Kurtzman, John Severin, and Al Feldstein, all of whom Al would outlive to become, in 2020, the Guinness Book record holder for the longest career as a working comics artist. His story is told in Al Jaffee’s Mad Life: A Biography by Mary-Lou Weisman and illustrated by Al (It Books, 2010).

And it was a spectacular career. Fifteen years at Timely and Atlas Comics before landing an assignment in the newly transformed Mad magazine for his old school chum, editor Harvey Kurtzman, whom he followed when the latter left after a dispute with publisher Bill Gaines. Kurtzman’s subsequent attempts at starting his own humor magazine (Trump for Playboy publisher Hugh Hefner, and the creator-owned Humbug) were unsuccessful and in 1958, Al returned to Mad where he would remain for an astonishing 65 years, appearing in 510 issues and filling 17 paperback collections with his work before retiring at the age of 99.

Class clowns Jaffee and Elder

His most famous contributions to Mad were the back cover Fold-Ins and his “Snappy Answers to Stupid Questions,” but Al wrote and/or drew dozens of features and articles for the magazine over the years. He won the National Cartoonist Society’s Reuben Award for cartoonist of the year in 2008 and was inducted into the Will Eisner Hall of Fame in 2013. The NCS website quotes famed New Yorker cartoonist Arnold Roth as saying, “Al Jaffee is one of the great cartoonists of our time,” and Peanuts creator Charles Schulz affirmed, “Al can draw anything.” His birthday in 2016 was declared to be “Al Jaffee Day” by New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio.

Like Charles Schulz said, Al could draw anything and during his amazing 78-year career, he probably did.

Here then, MY 13 FAVORITE (Mostly Not MAD) AL JAFFEE FEATURES:

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Military Comics #7 (Quality, February 1942). ­­In the beginning, there was the funny, and Al Jaffee was no doubt a possessor thereof! His first feature was Inferior Man, a hero who would rather avoid conflict, that he did for the Will Eisner shop. But the young cartoonist didn’t like the changes Eisner made to the strip, so he jumped ship to hitch his wagon to pre-Marvel Timely Comics and its more hands-off writer/editor, Stan Lee.

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Joker Comics #2 (Timely, June 1942). Jaffee got his feet wet on the Timely humor titles with one-pagers like “Squat Car Squad”…

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Comedy Comics #13 (Timely, January 1943). …And features like “Waldo and Ferdy.”

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Ziggy Pig and Silly Seal #1 (Timely, 1944). In an interview in Alter Ego #35 (April 2004), Jaffee recalled, “I created Ziggy Pig and Silly Seal from scratch. Stan said to me, ‘Create an animated-type character. Something different, something new.’ I searched around and thought, ‘I’ve never seen anyone do anything about a seal,’ so I made him the lead character. … One day, Stan said to me, ‘Why don’t you give him a little friend of some sort?’ I had already created Ziggy Pig, who had his own little feature, so it was quite easy to combine them into one series. … I should add that, while I created Ziggy Pig, it was Stan who named him.”

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Georgie Comics #8 (Timely, November 1946). I hope it was love at first sight for Jaffee, because he would spend the next decade drawing the adventures of the vivacious Patsy Walker and her pals across scores of stories.

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Mad #25 (EC, September 1955). And then came Mad, that uncompromisin’, enterprisin’, anything but tranquilizin’, right on Mad. Jaffee was a natural fit, as Harvey Kurtzman well knew. His first sale was as a writer and the story, with art by Jack Davis, appeared in the mag’s second issue in the new magazine format. It wouldn’t be his last.

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Patsy and Hedy #46 (Atlas, October 1956). Breaking up is hard to do, but after 10 years, Jaffee bid farewell to his Timely/Atlas pals and gals once and for all.

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Humbug #2 (1957). Shortly thereafter, in solidarity with Kurtzman in a dispute with Gaines, Jaffee also left Mad. He would contribute to the two magazines Kurtzman would launch post-MAD—the aforementioned Trump and Humbug—but when those failed to find an audience, Jaffee didn’t get even. He got Mad and Gaines was happy to have him back.

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Tall Tales (New York Herald Tribune, 1957-63). For the New York Herald Tribune, Jaffee created Tall Tales, a syndicated strip that appeared in more than 100 newspapers for a total of 2,200 strips, all of them making use of the strip’s vertical format. A 2008 hardcover reprinted 120 of the strips with an introduction by Stephen Colbert.

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Mad #88 (July 1964). And so, it began! The very first Fold-In, which would go on to appear in every issue of Mad but two until 2020!

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Mad #98 (October 1965). “Excuse me, are these Al Jaffee’s very first ‘Snappy Answers to Stupid Questions’?”

“No, they’re the last, we’re just publishing them in reverse order!”

“No, but if you say ‘Al Jaffee’s Snappy Answers to Stupid Questions’ three times fast, hopefully it will make you disappear.”

“No, by crazy coincidence it’s actually the first line of my Bar Mitzvah portion!”

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Mad #7 (June 2019). The last of the regularly scheduled Fold-Ins…

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Mad #14 (August 2020). …And the end of an era! Al Jaffee’s final, farewell Fold-In. What? Him worry?

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MORE

— 13 MAD FOLD-INS: An AL JAFFEE Tribute. Click here.

— 13 SNAPPY COVERS: A Mad AL JAFFEE Birthday Celebration. Click here.

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