Al Jaffee, Mad Magazine’s inventive cartoonist, dies at 102

By Neil Genzlinger

NEW YORK: Al Jaffee, a cartoonist who folded in when the trend in magazine publishing was to fold out, thereby creating one of Mad magazine’s most recognisable and enduring features, died on Monday in Manhattan. He was 102. His death, at a hospital, was caused by multi-system organ failure, his granddaughter Fani Thomson said.

It was in 1964 that Jaffee created the Mad Fold-In, an illustration-with-text feature on the inside of the magazine’s back cover that seemed at first glance to deliver a straightforward message. When the page was folded in thirds, however, both illustration and text were transformed into something entirely different and unexpected, often with a liberal-leaning or authority-defying message.

For instance, the fold-in from the November 2001 issue asked, “What mind-altering experience is leaving more and more people out of touch with reality?” The unfolded illustration showed a crowd of people popping and snorting various substances. But when folded, the image transformed into the Fox News anchor desk.

The first fold-in, in the April 1964 issue (No. 86), mocked Elizabeth Taylor’s marital record. (Unfolded, she is with Richard Burton; folded, she has traded him in for another guy.) No one, especially Jaffee, expected that fold-in to be followed by hundreds more. “It was supposed to be really a one-shot,” he said in a 1993 interview with The Kansas City Star. “But because of the overwhelming demand of three or four of my relatives, it went on to a second time, and on and on.” That “on and on” turned into a career that included other memorable contributions to Mad, like a “Snappy Answers to Stupid Questions” feature, and that in 2007 won him cartooning’s top honour, the Reuben Award, putting him in the company of Charles M. Schulz, Mort Walker, Gary Larson, Matt Groening and other luminaries of the trade.

With the fold-in, Mad was turning an industry trend on its head. “Playboy, of course, was doing its centerfold,”Jaffee told The Star. “Life, in almost every issue, was doing a three- or four-page gatefold showing how dinosaurs traversed the land, that kind of thing. Even Sports Illustrated had fold-outs.”

Mad went in the other direction, literally, although Jaffee said in a 2008 interview with The New York Times that he initially didn’t expect the magazine’s editor, Al Feldstein, and publisher, William M. Gaines, to go for the notion. “I have this idea,” he recalled telling them. “I think it’s a funny idea, but I know you’re not going to buy it. But I’m going to show it to you anyway. And you’re not going to buy it because it mutilates the magazine.”

The men did buy it, and then asked for more, and the inside back cover quickly became Jaffee’s turf. Although other regular Mad features changed artists over the years, no one but Jaffee drew a fold-in for 55 years.

In mid-2019, the magazine announced that it would stop printing issues full of new material, except for year-end specials. In the special issue that appeared at the end of 2019, the cartoonist Johnny Sampson, with Jaffee’s blessing, became the only other artist to draw a fold-in. “It’s not that Al does not have an ego,” Sam Viviano, Mad’s art director, said in 2008. “You don’t draw your face into everything you do without some kind of an ego. But it’s a really healthy ego.”