Mad Magazine artist Al Jaffee’s final piece of fold-in artwork has been published as the 99-year-old cartoonist retires. For decades, Jaffee provided his unique artwork to the popular humor publication, with his notable work including the classic Snappy Answers to Stupid Questions segments.
Jaffee is also the illustrator behind the iconic Mad fold-in pages found at the tail end of every issue, which involved readers folding in the page a certain way to unveil a hidden image with an accompanying joke. The feature just might be as famous as Mad mascot Alfred E. Neuman himself.
Late cartoonist Charles Schulz, known for creating Charlie Brown in the Peanuts comic strip, once wrote that, “Al can cartoon anything.” Another famous cartoonist, Arnold Roth of the New Yorker, also referred to Jaffe as “one of the great cartoonists of our time.”
Jaffee began his career as an artist in 1941 when he was about 20 years old and spend the next several years working with Stan Lee as a comic book artist for Timely Comics and Atlas Comics, which were the precursors to Marvel Comics. He’d go on to draw the Tall Tales comic strip for the New York Herald Tribune for many years as well, but his big break came in 1955 when he first started drawing for Mad Magazine.
