Al

Apparently, one feature of getting to be as old as Al Jaffee is that everyone in the news business has your obit pre-written. I was amazed how swiftly they appeared today. I call your attention to the ones in The New York Times, The Hollywood Reporter, The Associated Press and Rolling Stone. They'll tell you about his long, extraordinary life. I'll tell you about some other things…

Al 'n' me. Photo by Charles Kochman.

Al was a shining example of what I wrote about here the other day; about how sometimes you meet your heroes and they're everything you want them to be. Al was friendly, kind, charming and way less abrasive than you'd expect of the guy who created a feature called "Snappy Answers to Stupid Questions." Everyone loved the guy for himself, not just for his cartooning.

Al contributed to (by my count) 469 issues of MAD magazine in its original numbering which stopped at 550. MAD began renumbering after that and Al had just a few new pages in the new version including his last Fold-In, drawn but not printed a few years before. So his first MAD contribution was in 1955 and his last was in either 2019 or 2020, depending on how you score the last few. That would be impressive even if they were mediocre but Al's batting average was pretty darned good.

I regretted that in his last decade or two, he didn't do much beyond the Fold-Ins. Some of the non-foldable material was quite wonderful and I really liked some of the MAD paperbacks he did. I have them all but they should be in print for others to enjoy.

Al was one of those guys who was just born to be a cartoonist. It was hard to imagine him being anything else and he loved doing it. The last time we spoke was not long after he'd given up the notion of drawing anything and you could hear the frustration in his voice. He was still occasionally thinking of gags, though. His drawing hand may have failed him but his sense of humor didn't. I'd like to think it's what kept him around for so long.