March 14, 2017 permalink
What Keeps Al Jaffee, the Genius Behind Mad Magazine’s Fold-Ins, Going After 52 Years →
If it ever gets too bleak, just remember that Al Jaffee is still making the world a better place through his incredible (and bitingly funny) illustrations for Mad at age 96 (!!!).
I was making fun of the fold-outs you’d see in Playboy or National Geographic or Life Magazine. They had these big, fancy, full-color fold-outs. Well, at Mad we didn’t have that kind of budget. So I thought, wouldn’t it be funny to do the exact opposite? We’d do a cheap black-and-white fold in.
I love that the Fold-In started as another subversive bit of meta-humor about how “cheap” Mad magazine is.
On a side note, Columbia University acquired Jaffee’s paper archives a couple of years ago — I’d be amazing to look through that trove of 50+ years of sketches.