American cartoonist (1921-2023). He was born Abraham Jaffee and adopted the name Allan Jaffee later in life. He was born in Savannah, Georgia to Jewish immigrants from Zarasai, Lithuania. Beginning in 1927, Jaffee and his three brothers would take turns living with either their father in America or their mother in Lithuania, where they lived in a shtetl. Since there wasn't a lot to read in Lithuania, his father would mail them clippings from comic strips, and Jaffee taught himself to trace comic characters like Little Orphan Annie in the sand to amuse his friends. Soon, the three oldest boys moved back to live in Queens with his father, and in 1940, his youngest brother returned to the United States after his mother and much of Zarasai's Jewish population was murdered in the Holocaust.
Jaffee studied at New York City's High School of Music and Art in the late '30s. In addition to his brother Harry, his other classmates included Will Elder, Harvey Kurtzman, Al Feldstein, and John Severin, all of whom would eventually work for Mad Magazine. After graduating, he worked as an artist for a number of comic books before joining the Army during World War II. The military gave soldiers the option of changing their name for free, and Jaffee changed his first name from Abraham to Allan. The military employed him as an artist -- one of his projects was designing the floor plan for the Rusk Institute of Rehabilitation Medicine.
Jaffee returned to civilian life the next year and worked at Timely Comics for Stan Lee. He was an editor, writer, and artist for Timely's humor and teenage comics, including the Patsy Walker comics. He started working at Mad in 1955, but exited quickly when editor Harvey Kurtzman left. He followed Kurtzman to a couple different humor publications, one called Trump and the other Humbug. Neither was particularly successful, especially compared to Mad, and when Humbug shuttered in 1958, Jaffee went back to working for Bill Gaines and Mad. But Mad wasn't yet Jaffee's only gig -- from 1957-1963, he drew a strip for the New York Herald Tribune called Tall Tales, a wordless gag strip geared around long vertical panels. He also scripted a few comic strips during the '60s and '70s.
But what Jaffee is best known for is his work at Mad, where he was the brains behind one of the magazine's most enduring features: the Fold-In. Jaffee hit on the idea while thinking of the way many magazines had features that could be unfolded from the publication to see a larger photo or article -- centerfolds in men's magazines for one, but publications like Life and National Geographic also had maps and infographics that could be folded out of the magazine. Jaffee thought that making a feature that'd have to be folded in instead of out would be a funny way to spoof those fancy glossy magazines.
So what Jaffee created was a large picture with a caption that when folded together in a specific way revealed a different hidden picture and caption as the punchline for the larger image. It sounds simple enough, but was really a remarkable feat of graphic engineering. Jaffee later described showing the first fold-in to his bosses at Mad. He brought the image to editor Al Feldstein, who was fascinated by the mechanics of how it worked, folding and unfolding it repeatedly. Jaffee told him he wasn't sure it'd be something the magazine would want, as folding it would mutilate the magazine. Feldstein took the cartoon upstairs to publisher Bill Gaines, who also loved the idea and decided to publish it, since maybe people would buy two copies so they could fold one issue and leave the other one pristine.
The first Fold-In was a success, and about a month afterwards, Feldstein asked Jaffee when the next one was coming. Jaffee had actually considered the Fold-In to be a one-time thing, so he hadn't planned to make any more. He ended up putting another one together, and the Fold-In became an integral part of the publication, appearing in nearly every issue of Mad from 1964 to 2020.
There are lots of cool things about the Fold-In, but one of the most amazing is that Jaffee did most of the work by hand. He'd use computers occasionally, to make some designs easier to produce, but for the most part, he was creating the Fold-Ins on paper, on a drawing board. He'd start with the finished, folded image, then spread it apart to fill in the full-size, unfolded image. Once the full image was traced onto an illustration board, he'd paint the entire thing. Since the illustration board was too stiff to fold, he wouldn't even see the folded images until they were printed in the magazine.
The last Jaffee-created Fold-In appeared in the August 2020 issue. He'd actually created it six years before, with the expectation that it would be published after his death. Instead, Mad published it in a special tribute issue after he'd announced his retirement. The last one asked the question "Why is the "What, Me Worry?" kid so worried?" The full picture featured Mad mascot Alfred E. Neuman with his head in his hands with a thought balloon high above his head full of gloom and doom. In the background was a large cityscape full of businesses with signs announcing their closures and bankruptcy. The folded image showed the thought balloon turned into a peaceful image of Jaffee, with the business signs transformed into the message: "No More New Jaffee Fold-Ins."
Jaffee's other regular feature -- and a personal favorite -- was "Snappy Answers to Stupid Questions," which would feature a cartoon of some dip asking a dumb, obvious question while someone else responds with three to five comebacks. For example: A parent brings a couple kids to an X-rated theater and asks, "Is this picture alright for kids?" The ticket taker responds with "Only if accompanied by an adult pervert" and "Only if they wear earmuffs and face the rear of the theater" and "Yes, you'll need them to explain what's going on."
Jaffee won multiple National Cartoonists Society awards, Reuben Awards, the Sergio Award, and he was inducted into the Will Eisner Hall of Fame. The Guinness Book of World Records decreed that he had "the longest career as a comics artist" clear back in 2016. Jaffee ended up being Mad's longest-serving contributor, working for the magazine for 65 years. By the time he retired -- at 99 years old! -- he was also the oldest contributor to the magazine.
He was greatly admired by cartoonists and comedians. When the writers at The Daily Show were writing "America (The Book)," they requested Jaffee make a Fold-In for the book. When he finished and asked where he should have it shipped, they asked him to deliver it in person because they all wanted to meet him. In a 2006 episode of "The Colbert Report," host Stephen Colbert celebrated Jaffee's birthday with a Fold-In birthday cake, which was decorated with the message: "Al, you have repeatedly shown artistry & care of great credit to your field." After removing the middle section of the cake, the message read: "Al, you are old."
Al Jaffee died on April 10, 2023, at the age of 102.