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Al Jaffee, king of the Mad Magazine fold-in, has died
- dbelson 4y agohttps://archive.ph/pmiVI https://archive.ph/pmiVI
- herdcall 4y agoI used to love Mad writers, each so different and brilliant in their own way...Al Jaffee was no exception.
- toomuchtodo 4y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al_Jaffee https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al_Jaffee
- singeezie 4y agoWow. Respect for the guy with the longest career ever as a comics artist, think over 70 years in the game. He began his career in the comic book industry in the 1940s, working for publishers such as Timely Comics (which later became Marvel Comics) and DC Comics. Jaffee began working for Mad magazine in 1955, and over the years, he became one of the most influential contributors to the magazine. He created the famous "fold-in" feature for Mad magazine in 1964. The fold-in was a back cover feature that presented a seemingly innocuous image, which, when the page was folded, revealed a hidden message or image. RIP to a legend…
- DonHopkins 4y ago"You fold it, you bought it!" -Jeff Albertson "Those magazines create a dangerous amount of laughter." -Marge Simpson https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VG_f0_jfHRU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VG_f0_jfHRU "Wow. I'll never wash these eyes again." -Bart Simpson https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qjlDDZkGONs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qjlDDZkGONs "Not Mad! That's our nation's largest mental illness themed humor magazine!" -Homer Simpson https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zghcvq-pL7A https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zghcvq-pL7A "So, we meet again, Mad Magazine." -Seymour Skinner https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5MLa7WWwskg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5MLa7WWwskg
- Waterluvian 4y agoTIL Comic Book Guy has a canonical name.
- DonHopkins 4y agoOh, this is a recently unearthed gem: The Mad Magazine TV Special | 1974 | 16mm | 2K Scan 6,763 views Premiered Sep 9, 2022 #Animation #MAD #MADMagazine Mark Kausler animated the ‘Spy vs Spy’ segment on this special. He managed to get a copy of the special on 16mm which is what we used to scan. Film scanning done by Blackhawk Films: https://www.fpa-blackhawk.com https://www.fpa-blackhawk.com An animated adaptation of the notorious satire comic magazine. The skits include a look at a modern American car factory, the inner workings of a hospital, a spoof of The Godfather (1972), Mad Magazine's X-Ray vision and Spy vs. Spy. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dUQiXGA-0Tk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dUQiXGA-0Tk
- jimbokun 4y agoJust watched the whole thing. Holds up surprisingly well! Mysterious charges on hospital bills are just as relevant today as in 1974.
- Lammy 4y ago“What kind of slime would I marry?” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j9QiYuErgvE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j9QiYuErgvE
- salgernon 4y ago“(/usr/ucb/mail -s ‘Pizza Order’ ‘pizza-server@poit.eng.sun.com’)” I had just paged that most useless piece of trivia in, but “poit” was from a Don Martin cartoon in Mad, not Al Jaffee. Nevertheless, Excelsior!
- ilamont 4y agoHis signature was all over the magazine (not just the fold-in) when I was a reader in the 70s and early 80s, when he was in his 50s. To think that he was learning from comics published when he was a kid in the 1920s and 1930s, drawn by artists born in the 1800s is amazing!
- nemo44x 4y agoI loved Mad and Jaffee’s work when I was a kid. I was going through my grandmas attic once and I came across a stash of Mad Magazines from the 60’s which must have been my fathers or uncles. Needless to say they had a ton of Jaffee work in them and I never felt so lucky as to come across that stash.
- CharlesW 4y agoSince the article has no examples that show how this worked, here's a CSS simulation of two fold-ins for anyone who hasn't had the pleasure of folding the back page of their Mad Magazine: https://thomaspark.co/2020/06/the-mad-magazine-fold-in-effect-in-css/ https://thomaspark.co/2020/06/the-mad-magazine-fold-in-effec... (Note the bottom copy before/after as well.)
- fsckboy 4y agonot MAD magazine, but a fold-in from the same time period, and with the same sense of humor. not entirely safe for work but I'd be surprised if anybody's offended: 1. https://i0.wp.com/cheapskatecafe.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/Land_O_Lakes-logo.png https://i0.wp.com/cheapskatecafe.com/wp-content/uploads/2011... 2. https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EVzZqXNX0AEaF0h.jpg https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EVzZqXNX0AEaF0h.jpg unfortunately, Land O Lakes has recently changed their packaging after 50+ years
- latchkey 4y agoThis kind of reminds me of the 'player' I built for https://www.wrap.co/ https://www.wrap.co/, all in CSS. Getting the page turn correct was a fun battle.
- Waterluvian 4y agoI don’t understand the first one. Can someone help? Oh! Is it supposed to be a fold-in? Hah. All work and no play.
- karaokeyoga 4y ago"What does Al Jeffee get to do on his birthday?" "Another damn fold-in." (Hover over the image to see the effect.)
- nemo44x 4y agoThe best part of the fold-in was the comically cynical idea behind it that collectors of Mad Magazine had to ruin their issue to do the fold-in thus forcing them to buy another issue to keep in “mint condition”. Was a meta-satire on the collecting hobby that required collectors to not actually use and enjoy the collectible.
- nemo44x 4y agoWhat a well lived life. The best. RIP.
- jmclnx 4y agoYes, may you rest in peace without any worries
- hairofadog 4y agoThere are few things that will whoosh me back to my childhood critic-in-Ratatouille style faster than looking at a page of his artwork. Cheers, Al Jaffee.
- zwieback 4y agoI grew up in Germany (this was the 80s) and one way my dad encouraged us to learn English was subscriptions to various US magazines, one of them was Mad Magazine. We loved it even though we missed a few cultural references. The fold in was great but I have to admit, every issue the "Fold back so A meets B" instructions somehow created the wrong image in my head and I'd go, "wait, fold which one where?". Over and over.
- Mistletoe 4y agoHe’s a legend to me. So many good times and laughs reading this magazine as a child. Thank you Al. What, me worry?
- jedberg 4y agoNever noticed this at the bottom of the obits before: > How The Times decides who gets an obituary. If you made news in life, chances are your death is news, too. There is no formula, scoring system or checklist. We investigate, research and ask around before settling on our subjects. > “Some 155,000 people die between each day’s print version of The New York Times and the next — enough to fill Yankee Stadium three times over. On average, we publish obituaries on about three of them.” -- William McDonald, obituary editor
- PostOnce 4y agoI moved to the other side of the world 8,000miles / 13,000km away. So I go into the public library and pick up a MAD Magazine one morning, and there in the letters section is my old GP from back home, writing in that he's been reading MAD since he was a kid. Small world.
- bombcar 4y agoDonald Knuth’s first published work was published in Mad Magazine - https://silezukuk.tumblr.com/post/616657913 https://silezukuk.tumblr.com/post/616657913 He lists it as his first published paper: https://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/vita.pdf https://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/vita.pdf So the arguably most reknown computer scientist of all time got his start in Mad Magazine.
- redshirtrob 4y agoHere's a fun fact: There's a typo in his article [0]. I only learned about the typo when I asked him to sign my copy at a Christmas Tree lecture years ago. Instead of signing it, he corrected the typo. He had a mnemonic he used to remember the digits in a Potrzebie. He had the mnemonic stored on a file on his home machine. I watched him ssh to the machine, then fire up Emacs to look up the mnemonic. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Potrzebie https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Potrzebie
- euroderf 4y agoWasn't "gzorp" a Mad-ism too ? And no doubt forgetting many others...
- flyinghamster 4y agoThat could be Don Martin - he was the sound effects king. sklork
- pentagrama 4y agoJust looking some Mad Magazine covers [1], some amazing drawings right there, those more realistic remembered me when the Ren & Stimpy cartoon put those freeze frames with detailed and often shocking images [2], Bob Esponja also did those. Wondering if those cartoons pick some of this style from Mad Magazine. [1] https://duckduckgo.com/?va=w&t=hk&q=mad+magazine+covers&iax=images&ia=images https://duckduckgo.com/?va=w&t=hk&q=mad+magazine+covers&iax=... [2] https://renandstimpy.fandom.com/wiki/Gruesome_close-ups https://renandstimpy.fandom.com/wiki/Gruesome_close-ups
- kstrauser 4y agoI'd have a hard time exaggerating Mad Magazine's influence on my young mind. In particular, their cynical take on advertising pretty much is my view of it. For instance, if I see something like "'Hot New Game' is 'a thrill ride'", I assume they lopped off "...for kindergartners who scare too easily". I love ya, Mad gang. Thank you for sneakily teaching this kid some critical thinking.
- xxr 4y agoYep—once a month when an issue came in the mail, it was like a bomb went off
- kstrauser 4y agoI could never talk my parents into a subscription, but the grocery story had the magazine a glorious rack full of their books.
- tanseydavid 4y agoReading Mad always felt so subversive! And this was before I had any idea what the word "subversive" even meant.
- kstrauser 4y agoIt permanently warped millions of American youths. Fortunately.
- ConceptJunkie 4y agoThe funny thing about Mad is that it was incredibly literate, especially in the 50s and 60s. Those were some smart guys writing "Snappy Comebacks to Stupid Questions", etc. In fact Al Jaffee just passed away at the amazing age of 102. Hacker News had a link to a piece about him in the NYT.
- nkozyra 4y agoI think it falls in that category of stuff meant for kids but not dumbed down for kids. This tends to be the absolute best content for young readers, because we all feel like we're hanging with the adults. Even better, with the funny and/or smart adults. It tends to elevate young people because that's when we're most desperate to be older/cooler/smarter/funnier. Despite this being a huge part of a lot of people's lives, it always felt like you were in a club. You could get away with stealing jokes and delivering them at school without anyone catching on. You could copy the style of art from an issue and nobody was the wiser (I won an art contest in 6th grade with something very close to a MAD artist I no longer recall). I don't know what the modern equivalent is. What's the barely-above-ground cultural lynchpin that sneaks a few kids into the late night comedy club now?
- mherdeg 4y agoUsed to take family vacations to a little cottage where the only entertainment was the Mad Magazine Board Game. Great material, loved the tone, just really fine work.
- mpd 4y agocollect $1,329,063
- owlninja 4y agoHim, Don Martin, and Sergio Aragones gave me plenty of laughs and an appreciation for a cartoonist's style as a youth.
- maxcan 4y agoBut, one could argue that it was truly Jake Tapper who perfected the art. IYKYK.
- drukenemo 4y agoSaw his work also in Mad Brazil, which was a magazine mixing American and Brazilian artists. I grew up with Mad and still have a huge vintage collection. I wonder if Mad also existed in other countries with local artists and language. RIP Al Jaffee Edit: found this https://madtrash.com/brazilian-mad/ https://madtrash.com/brazilian-mad/
- jamesfinlayson 4y agoI think Australian Mad Magazine was lot of the American content with some local stuff mixed in (not sure who did the art for the local stuff - locals I assume but it seemed to match the style well enough from what I remember).
- vintermann 4y agoYes, there were local versions! Sverre Helmer Christensen was a notorious Danish underground comic artist who I know got published in Norwegian MAD. My parents were friends of his parents, and I remember they bought that issue. I remember his parents as a mild-mannered couple, and I wonder how their oldest son turned out to be such an outrageous shock artist. Not that it appeared to phase them at all, they were very proud of him. Sadly Sverre died of leukaemia at the age of 30, but I recently learned he was the main inspiration for my favourite current Norwegian underground comics artist, Jens K. Styve. I think that of the different comics traditions that came out of the USA, MAD was one of the greatest and most influential outside it. It was also itself a lot more internationally inclined than the others. They knew and loved the Latin American newspaper comic tradition, and the French comic traditions, at a time when those weren't on many Americans' radars.
- NovaDudely 4y agoTalk about leaving a mark on the world! But that goes for the entirety of Mad Magazine. Always loved the stories Dick Debartolo would dig up on 'The Giz Wiz' regarding William Gaines and occasionally Jaffee.
- 1letterunixname 4y agoAlfred E. Neuman will live forever.
- acomjean 4y agoGothamist did a great interview with him 6 years ago. it’s 5 minutes and he talks about the origin of the foldin. https://youtu.be/pK6xE-9sdII https://youtu.be/pK6xE-9sdII (5 minutes) From the article: https://gothamist.com/arts-entertainment/hanging-with-al-jaffee-mad-magazines-95-year-old-journeyman-cartoonist https://gothamist.com/arts-entertainment/hanging-with-al-jaf... When I was a kid I always loved when I could get a hold of a mad magazine.
- lightedman 4y agoThat man shaped a major chunk of my mindset, alongside George Carlin. I used to have MAD magazines strewn across my room. I loved the schticks where they mocked various movies, the criticism was almost wholly on-point RIP Al. I had just bought the latest MAD "The Best of The Worst" a week or so ago, and am now compelled to read it.
- jakedata 4y agoWe should train LLaMA and DALL-E on the Mad Magazine archives and create AI-Jaffe.
- dsq 4y agoAs a litle kid I loved Mad magazine and Al Jaffee, even though it took me a long time to realize that each segment had an entirely different artist. I would look at the back cover without folding it to guess what was hiding there. RIP and Z"L.