Al being photographed for our Table of Contents by photo editor Patrick O’Dell
 

Al has been drawing comics for so long his hands wobble. He was there before comics were cool and he’ll be there long after they’re not. Actually no he won’t. He’ll be dead. Oh well, his work will live on forever and we were honored to be able to sit in his studio in midtown and pick his brain until it was sick of talking to us.

VICE: You were a zero when we discovered you last month.

Al Jaffee: I think that’s maybe being a little too generous to me.

You’d only been drawing for half a century. You were a rookie, a kid.

Yeah, and it’s about time that I got a break.

But seriously folks, what do you think of the issue?

I thought it was a great issue. I come from a different age and I think all the cartoonists are great in their own way, in their own style. Of course, they are dealing with the current audience, which is much less self-censoring, and they sort of deal with, not so much the mainstream but a different kind of audience than the one I’ve had to deal with all these years. I mean you couldn’t do that kind of stuff in MAD obviously.

Did any of it make you uncomfortable?

None of it made me uncomfortable. The only thing I couldn’t quite relate to from my own experience was that some of the things didn’t have a beginning, a middle, and an end. They were just sort of a stream of consciousness and ended at the arse-end of the page. That wasn’t many of them though. Most of them had very distinct points of view, and I thought the drawing was very good. I particularly like Johnny Ryan, and well, you know, I don’t want to single people out or leave people out, but I looked at all the cartoons and the styles go from A to Z. I enjoyed Johnny Ryan’s little story about Edward Gorey, whom I admired.

Gorey was great.

Yes he was.



He had that magic thing that Crumb has and Dave Cooper has where they can build up the gray of the page by cross-hatching and little details that few people can do. Most just add big blocks of black to the page in order to fill up the page. [note to non-cartoon types: a good comics page has about 50% black and 50% white. If you can’t cross hatch you’re forced to have a big black fridge in the background or whatever].

I’m a great admirer of Bob Crumb’s, whom I’ve met and talked with. He paid me a great compliment on one of my jobs in Humbug Magazine, which also contained tons and tons of crosshatch. But Bob Crumb then was very young—we met 45 years ago.

So how did that work. You worked at MAD for a bit, and then left to do Humbug and then you came back?

Yeah. Actually, my career at that time was sort of tied to Harvey Kurtzman. What happened was Harvey was the editor, and he approached me and asked me if I’d like to do some work for MAD. I was in comic books at that time, doing teenage comics which I really wasn’t crazy about, so I jumped at the chance. I called up Harvey and I said, “Harvey, I’m coming onboard,” and he says. “I just quit.” So now I’m high and dry because I’d just told Stan Lee that I wasn’t going to do teenage stuff anymore.

This was like Archie Andrews Where Are You? kind of stuff, right?

Yeah, It was like Archie. The title of my future was Patsy Walker—so on top of my discomfort about teenage material, this was about girls, and about the clothing they wore and all that kind of stuff. I even had to do a feature of styles that were sent in by girls and try to make them look professional. It was really not a labor of love, but I did the best I could and I needed the money, so it worked out OK.

How old were you back then?

I was in my late 20s. Prior to that I was doing animal stuff, like Super Rabbit, and Ziggy Pig & Silly Seal. This was all for Stan Lee’s comics, which at that time was Timely Comics and then became Marvel. I had a terrific relationship with Stan Lee—I don’t know what kind of relationship he had with me, but I thought it was symbiotic. He just let me write the stuff and draw the stuff, and he never even looked at it. He just trusted me. So we worked quite well together, and the magazines sold well, so that was OK.

Whenever I hear about you guys back in the 50s living in Manhattan, it just seems like you couldn’t do that today—you couldn’t move to the Upper West Side or Midtown and say, “I’d like to be a cartoonist, please,” and sit at a desk drawing all day.

No you couldn’t that, although I didn’t live in Manhattan at that time. I lived on Long Island and commuted when I actually worked at Timely Comics. Then things changed and I went freelance, and I still worked out on the island and delivered my work.

So your rent was cheap out there.

Well, it wasn’t the rent, you know. It was pretty close to the end of World War II, and there was this rush to buy homes and have children, so we went out and bought homes and grew lawns and threw our kids into the lawns and didn’t worry about them. It was only after my kids were grown and my wife and I separated that I came to Manhattan. But that was a long time ago too—that was in 1967.

So the wife you’re married to now isn’t your first wife.

No.

But you’ve still been married like a hundred years or something.

Next year we celebrate 30 years.

Does she read comics?

No, she’s Phi Beta Kappa and a very well educated and bright woman. She ran a clinic for senior citizens here in Manhattan among other things.



So what would you do if you came to bed one night and there she was with the bed-light on, reading Weirdo?

Well, she’s very open-minded. She’s seen it all and she’s read Vice and wasn’t surprised or shocked.

Did she like the Comics Issue?

Yes, though not as much as I did, you know, because she’s not as knowledgeable about art styles. She grew up in a more academic world than the world I grew up in. But we’ve talked about it, and she’s asked me a lot of questions, so she knows a hell of a lot more now than she did before we got married.

  Mad #1 cover by Kurtzman  

Kurtzman’s “Little Annie Fanny” from Playboy

Back to Harvey Kurtzman. He’s dead now but those covers he used to do back when MAD was sort of that small zine-size were stunning. The way he would draw women, with those stiletto heels—I remember being a young kid and having strange feelings in my loins about all the women he would draw. I guess that’s why they used him in Playboy so much. Oh yeah, he could do really realist stuff too. He was around before the Comic Book Code. Wasn’t MAD one of the first comics to have to adhere to the Code? That weird stamp? Tales from the Crypt And this was well before all the San Francisco, beatnik R. Crumb guys, right? MAD MAD And these people weren’t in the comics industry, they were just regular shitheads Just save buses falling off the edge of a cliff and put them back on the road. But it didn’t last too long did it? I mean, after that you had the whole San Francisco movement, Zap and all that stuff. Zap So would you say that the Comics Code stuff kind of started alternative comics? Where was MAD in all this, did they have to follow the Code? MAD MAD MAD But now they’re blaming video games. Now it’s Grand Theft Auto that’s making them do it. Well the beauty of it now is that there’s so many different media that if you criticize one you have to criticize them all, and it just becomes too much of a burden. If you censor video games, then you have to go after comics, you have to go after movies, you have to go after TV shows downloaded on iPods and bit torrents. So I think the courts just say, “Aw fuck it. I don’t want to get involved.” Let’s get back to MAD. There was an era in the 70s where you would have this “sung to the tune of—“ some Broadway thing from the 50s, and here we are in Canada or Ohio or wherever saying, “Uh, I’m not familiar with Broadway, I’m eight.” Or they had Dave Berg talking about when a punk shows up to pick up your daughter on a date and how horrible that is, and I remember thinking. “I can’t relate to this. I don’t even have a sister.” MAD Thanks. Star Wars parody written by Frank Jacobs and drawn by Mort Drucker Who was the guy who did all those? Dave Berg Nah. Frank Jacobs and Dave Berg ostracized us. They wrote for themselves and it was like we weren’t invited to the joke. The beauty of your stuff is that a bright eight-year-old can enjoy it and so can an adult. The inventions, for example. Some of those inventions ended up getting invented, didn’t they? I’ve seen one of those. But for the Ferris wheel MAD is mentioned in the patent. Another person that was great like that was Don Martin. He was an amazing goof. MAD Wait, what kind of sentence is that? He came to MAD with serious work? But he has such a distinct style, I can’t imagine him doing anything except big, cylindrical idiot-heads. MAD Al watches The Colbert Report on his computer What was the story with The Colbert Report? You were away in the Hamptons or somewhere when you saw it? The Colbert Report Colbert Report MAD my And what was it he said? Our movie here cuts it off… “He taught us that inflation is—“ The aforementioned thank you drawing Bet you couldn’t get to sleep after that. MAD MAD It is great and everything, but it’s a long time coming. Wait, more questions: how’d you get into cartooning? A painting by Al’s brother Harry And you’re grandkids are into painting too, aren’t they? So it’s genetic. Al sketching out this month’s cover Okay next topic: wobbly hands. Surgeons have to stop after they’re 60 cause they can’t keep their hands perfectly still anymore, and you look at Charles Schultz’s late stuff and he got pretty wiggly toward the end. But I’m looking at the cover right now, I don’t see wobbly lines. Well, I guess I do but it looks on purpose. Like you have to wrap your hand all the way around the other one? flourish So when you make a drawing you draw on tracing paper, then you cut it out, then you tape it to the board you want, and then when you’ve decided on the composition you trace each component via carbon paper onto the illustration board. The rough tracing paper layout Al did before committing his contribution to illustration board If you would just spend ten minutes learning Photoshop, you could just draw something, scan it, and then you could change the size or the composition and you would save three steps. MAD

See Al do his own fold-in starring “The Closet” by R Kelly

Well, there is something to that. I think people who don’t even know they’re looking at hand-drawn things—like when you see lettering and all the Es aren’t the same—I think there’s something in their subconscious that says, “Oh, this was man-made.” Al explains the pin holes he uses to line up the various parts of a fold-in So you don’t want to change the archaic way you do things. You’re happy with the way it works out. Is there anything about your 66-year career you would change if you could?

Humbug #11

Wait, don’t go. Let’s go back to those early days. Harvey Kurtzman said “Come to MAD” and you quit your job because you were bored but Harvey had already left? MAD MAD MAD Trump MAD Humbug Do you have any old copies of it? Those guys must be worth a mint. Humbug Just now? Maybe it’s just cause I’m a comics nerd, but this whole story sounds like Indiana Jones to me—I can hear trumpets in the background. More shots of Al’s studio here