Award-winning American cartoonist Al Jaffee, renowned for his work on satirical magazine Mad, has died at the age of 102. Jaffee, who was still working up until three years ago, set a Guinness World Record for his 77-year career.
He died in hospital on Monday of multi-system organ failure, his granddaughter told the New York Times. Mad magazine was aimed at pre-teens and teens, with Jaffee famed for his fold-ins on the inside back cover.
Jaffee’s famous fans included Peanuts creator Charles M. Schulz and his work was referenced in The Simpsons.
His trademark fold-ins were a spoof on the likes of Playboy and Sports Illustrated fold-out inserts.
They featured an image with a question above and a caption below. When the page was folded vertically into thirds, the two outer sections joined to form a new picture and caption which answered the question.
Jobs on Mars
The fold-ins included one Jaffee created in 1968 during the Vietnam war, which showed students outside a job centre accompanied by the question: “What is the one thing most school dropouts are sure to become?”
When folded, the image changed to a young person in a cannon with the caption: “Cannon fodder.”
A comic from 1980 showed a man on a fishing boat with a bent reel. “Are you going to reel in the fish?” his wife asks. “No,” he says, “I’m going to jump into the water and marry the gorgeous thing.”
Al Jaffee’s Mad Inventions were also popular, including items such as a smokeless ashtray.
Speaking to the Guardian in 2016 at the age of 95, Jaffee said he believed satire was becoming harder because of lying politicians.
“I think they’re defeating Mad, because they’re going beyond anything we can think of doing to show the clownish nature of their claims,” he said. “It used to be that politicians claimed that they would make jobs for everybody in the country within two years or something like that; now they claim that they’re going to make jobs for everybody on Mars.”
‘Endless amusement’
Jaffee’s famous fans included Far Side creator Gary Larson and TV host Stephen Colbert, who marked Jaffee’s 85th birthday by featuring a fold-in cake on his show The Colbert Report.
Matt Groening’s The Simpsons made references to Mad magazine and the fold-in in several episodes over the years.
Mad Magazine paid tribute to its long-time collaborator in an Instagram post, which described Jaffee as “a humble and kind creator. Al’s presence, his astute social commentary, and his endless amusement at life’s ups and downs shaped the fabric of the magazine.”
DC tweeted: “His signature style and wit will be MADly missed.” Satirical singer Weird Al Yankovic described Jaffee as one of his “all-time heroes”.
The cartoonist was born Abraham Jaffee (he later legally changed his name to Allan) in 1921, in Savannah, Georgia. His parents were Jewish Lithuanians but his mother never really settled in the US and she took Al and his three younger brothers back to Lithuania for six years.
His father brought him back to America when he was 12 and he began to attend the High School of Music and Art in New York.
He went on to work for Stan Lee and the New York Herald Tribune before enjoying a long career at Mad, although he always remained a freelancer. His awards included the Reuben Awards’ Cartoonist of the Year in 2008. To mark his retirement in 2020, Mad issued a Special All Jaffee Issue.
