Mad

magazine was the equivalent of the Big Bang for American postwar humor.

Mad

taught people to question authority, to think for themselves, and to laugh at the absurdity and horror of life. The first 23 issues, which were in color and comic-book size, are in many people’s opinions the greatest comics ever made.

Al Jaffee is a true artist who’s led an amazing life. He invented the

Mad

Fold-in in 1964. He also worked with Harvey Kurtzman and Will Elder on Harvey’s post-

Mad

attempts at humor magazines, as well as the

Playboy

comic

Little Annie Fanny

. At 88 he is still painting the

Mad

Fold-ins and illustrating a book that’s being written about his life. He is a shining example of what it means to be an artist. I’d say something snarky but I can’t. The guy’s just too great.

I never expected that I’d someday be welcomed into Al Jaffee’s studio for a lengthy interview about his life and opinions, but I was. And it was one of the greatest honors I’ve known.

Vice: Tell me about how you met Harvey Kurtzman and Will Elder.

Al Jaffee:

I met Willy when we were the same age, around 13 or so. We lived far apart, but when we got accepted to the School of Music and Art our families moved within a few blocks of each other. We became lifelong friends. When we were in junior high school they tried to get us to decide what kind of high school we wanted to go to and nothing appealed to us. The choices were an academic high school, an industrial high school, or an occupational high school. We didn’t like any of those. We had been drawing since we were little kids, and we wanted to do something in art. One day we got pulled out of our classes and sent up to an art room with 50 kids and given paper and pencil and told to draw something. I was sitting right behind Willy and I looked over his shoulder and was amazed. For a 12-year-old kid, that was a piece of fantastic work.

I’m familiar with that drawing. It’s reproduced in the book The Mad Playboy of Art. It makes me think that the ability to learn how to draw is something you’re born with. I went to art school and most people left my school not being able to draw as well as Will Elder at age 12. Were you as talented at Will Elder at 12?

I don’t think I was as good as Willy, but he could draw his entire family realistically. I was a cartoonist. Once I got into the High School of Music and Art and had to take figure-drawing classes, I caught up, but we were more interested in funny stuff.

Even Will Elder’s horror comics are funny.

We got in trouble because they looked down on cartooning at the High School of Music and Art. I remember when Willy came in one day after seeing

Snow White and the Seven Dwarves

. He fell in love with the animation—we all did. It was like magic. Will drew the whole set of dwarves and beautifully colored them. He was still only about 14. He rendered them in the same way

Little Annie Fanny

was rendered. He was showing it to the rest of us and an art teacher came over and looked at it and was furious. “Never ever bring junk like that into an art school!” A little on the stuffy side, I think. Art is art. Willy was a natural-born talent. I do believe talent is something you’re born with.

I don’t know if I believe in talent. I think some people are able to learn and some aren’t. My main educational push came from getting yelled at to look harder, slow down, and draw more often.

I agree. You can’t crack a whip at someone who doesn’t have basic art talent and expect them to learn to draw. I knew musicians at the School of Music and Art whose mothers had made them play the piano since they were four and they were good enough to get into the school but they had no real chance. A lot of them became very proficient but mechanical. They became dentists and lawyers and enjoyed music as a hobby. Not everyone can be great. I might be prejudiced since I’ve been lucky.

What were you reading then?

I had a checkered career as far as growing up is concerned. When I was six years old I was taken to a very small village in Lithuania. There was no reading matter. My father, who remained in the US, would save up all the Sunday and daily comic strips and every six months or so he’d mail us a roll of all the comics, six inches in diameter. My brother Harry, who was a very good artist, would sit for months and read them over and over again. We learned how to read on our own by doing that.

My friend’s father grew up shoeless in Puerto Rico and learned English from reading comics.

This is why I was furious with Dr. Fredric Wertham, who condemned comics. And many educators followed him. The best way to teach kids how to read is to let them read what they enjoy. Lots of kids from very poor neighborhoods learned from comics because they resisted the normal schoolbooks.

Early submission to Military Comics, courtesy of Al Jaffee

When and how did you come to America?

Just about the time that Hitler took power in Germany, our father came and took us back. That saved the life of my brothers and me. My father was smart enough to figure that out. My mother did not want to come back, and she died there. She had family and friends and enjoyed the village life more than the big city. She didn’t intend to stay forever, but she told my father that she’d settle her affairs and join him, but she delayed and delayed and delayed until Hitler invaded and killed everybody in that town.

Oh my God.

That was the end of that episode.

Do you remember moving?

I was seasick the whole time. We came to New York and tried to get going.

Where were you living?

I lived in the Bronx. My brother Harry lived with an uncle in Brooklyn. My other brother was deaf so he went to a special school. We were scattered, and it took a couple of years before our father brought us all together in the same apartment. It was kind of a crazy life.

A friend of mine, Mary-Lou Weisman, a wonderful writer, is writing a book called

Al Jaffee’s Mad Life

, which I’m illustrating. She fills it out in greater detail. It should be more interesting than what I’m telling you now. If anyone’s interested in more Al Jaffee than you need, they can get it in that book.

Why are most of the early comic artists Jewish?

Anti-Semitism was pretty strong, and many businesses were closed to Jews so they became ragpickers, ran pushcarts. The Lower East Side was packed with pushcarts run by Jewish vendors. When Bill Gaines’s father invented comic books, it opened up a business that didn’t bar Jews, and artists who couldn’t get work from WASP advertising agencies flocked to it. There were non-Jewish people as well. There was a mix. It was heavily loaded with Jews.

What was Bill Gaines like?

Bill wanted to be a physics teacher, and he wasn’t too happy when the publishing business fell into his hands because his father was killed in a motor-boat accident. He tried to make it a friendly family affair, and he really loved all his people. He also had to become a tough businessman. He was more lenient when he started. He did something very unusual where he would pay for the health insurance of his freelance artists. He would have parties and take us on lavish

Mad

trips all over the world and give us bonuses. He was a benevolent publisher, but he became a tough businessman. You had to sign a statement when you did something for

Mad

that said that

Mad

owned all rights and the right to republish all of the material without paying royalties.

Growing up in the Bronx, were you a fan of the Yankees?

No, but Willy Elder was a thorough Yankee fan, and I would tease him all the time because I didn’t give a crap about it. He’d come to me saying, “Juh see what DiMaggio did?” and he’d get so excited about it. I’d say, “Come on, it’s a grown man playing children’s games.” And he’d get furious. “Whaddya mean, ‘children’s games’?! This is serious business!” Where I lived in Europe, there was no one making money hitting balls. We’d play soccer but we didn’t even have a ball, we’d roll up a bunch of rags and kick it around. When I came here and saw grown men making large amounts of money for doing the kind of stuff we were punished for in Europe, I was confused. The city of New York was the strangest place. People living on top of one another. I was making cartoons about clotheslines and the funny underwear that would come out. Since I came to America at the age of 12, I was very far behind on the American cultural scene.

And yet you’re able to understand it better than most!

Catching up with things like sports was difficult for me. I went out and played stickball as any kid would, but I never developed a passion for a team. Falling in love with the Yankees or the Giants or Dodgers… They were just curiosities to me. I could never care who wins or loses.

Tom Wolfe always said that he tried to write about things with a man-from-Mars perspective.

You can have a more objective view and not come in with fixed biases. I think the first job I did for

Mad

was when Harvey Kurtzman was editor. He said to me, “I want you to write something for me, not draw, write.” And I said, “What should I write?”

Up to that point, I was doing teenage comics, and satire was not something I’d had an opportunity to do, although my first attempt to get into comics was a character called Inferior Man. I have it over here. I showed this to Will Eisner and he hired me to do it in

Military Comics

.

I love this.

This is the only really satiric thing I’d tried to do. I’d known Kurtzman from the School of Music and Art when I was a senior and he was a freshman. He told Willy and me that he fell in love with our work and determined that at some point he was going to be a magazine publisher and he was going to get me and Willy and a few others into the magazine, which he eventually did. You have a more objective view when you come from another culture. You don’t have a fixed place. Everything is open.