Click here for past issues of the Globe Magazine, dating back to June 22, 1997

Letters to the Magazine editor:
Mail can be sent to Letters to the Editor, The Boston Globe, P.O. Box 2378, Boston, MA 02107-2378. The email address is [email protected] or use our form.

Al Jaffee

How did you get into this disreputable line of work?
I always had a leaning toward it. When I was a teenager, I created a comic strip called Inferior Man at the same time that Superman came out. It was published as filler in comic books. He was a little accountant by daytime, and by nighttime, he ran out in his underwear and jumped from roof to roof, usually missing. My contemporaries were trying to do other Superman things, but I was going in the opposite direction. I would say that making fun of things is what I do.

Are you a case of arrested development?
I'm just a crazy kid in my head. You have to have a kind of rascally, revolutionary spirit that we had when we were kids, where you love and respect your parents but you want to defy them. And you have to have that feeling about your country, your politics, everything. You can't take it all that seriously, because there's a lot of BS going on out there.

Can you explain the longevity of Fold-In?
It's unique in Mad in that it is an editorial cartoon. Mad doesn't carry editorial cartoons: It carries jokes. And also, it's interactive: The reader gets to do something [that is, fold a full-page picture, which then produces a smaller, satirical visual comment].

Was your family the source of your iconoclasm?
It might come from my dysfunctional upbringing. My father and mother originally came from Lithuania. When I was 6, my mother took me and my brothers back - like reverse immigrants. Back into a very small community, a shtetl. We were there from 1927 to 1933. I was born in Savannah, Georgia, and I knew nothing about the Jewish community, and suddenly I had to learn to speak Yiddish, which is the only language the ghetto people spoke. It was an oppressive society. I mean, Lithuanians were not aggressively mistreating the Jews, but the Jews were kept out of every aspect of society. They couldn't work in government offices, and there were many places you couldn't go. Very restrictive. And so, a kind of sardonic sense of humor develops. I listened to the comments these old Jews would make about the government and its leaders, and it would be sort of satirical. There was an undercurrent - oh, there was a tremendous, subversive undercurrent. My father came over and brought us back when Hitler came into power.

Did you lose your ties to the US?
My brother and I maintained the connection with America, because, before leaving Savannah, I made my father swear on the Bible that he would send all the comic strips to Lithuania. So every six months or so, a huge roll of newspaper comic strips arrived at the post office. My brother and I would be in ecstasy for months. We literally learned to read and write English from reading the comic strips. We didn't have any English books, but we were absolutely passionate about following Little Orphan Annie and all the early comic strips. We copied them - we would sit down and draw those characters. And we would invent our own little comic strips. We got into it very early, and my brother became a fine artist, but I went the other way.

Are people surprised a man your age works for a cheeky youth magazine?
Yeah. I gave one of my paperback books, called Snappy Answers to Stupid Questions, to a friend. I met him a couple of months later, and he said - and this is one of my favorite comments - "Al, I can't figure it out, a man of your intelligence doing this kind of crap!" Grown-ups, with whom I don't identify myself, think that what I do is: a) not understandable; b) understandable but childish; or c) a silly way to make a living.

Ever voted Republican?
Not to my knowledge.

Describe your politics.
I don't know if I'm pro-Democratic Party, but I know that I am becoming more and more powerfully against what the Republican Party stands for. It's regressive, on a social level, somewhere in the Dark Ages.

Your originals for Mad must be worth a lot.
I haven't sold any of my originals, except to personal friends. I'm a very bad businessman and am loath to get into that, so I'm going to bequeath the problem to my [two, adult] children.

What's in your future?
The way things are going now is very pleasant. It takes me two leisurely weeks to do the [monthly] Fold-In, so then I have time to enjoy Provincetown. This is the best thing that ever happened to me. Starting in January in New York, I dream about May in Provincetown, which is when we [Jaffee and his wife, Joyce] come up here. But if I were fired tomorrow from Mad, I think the old creative juices, the old invention, would surge. And either I would be storming the galleries and creating tons of stuff for them or trying to invent a line that fits me that's half crazy humor and half fine art. I don't know. I've thought about it often. When I was down and out, I had to invent. When Humbug magazine folded and I had not yet thought of joining Mad, because it was our competitor, I created a comic strip overnight, Tall Tales. It ran for six years in the Herald Tribune. At the critical moment, I've always come up with something. That's the whole game.