Mad Magazine's Al Jaffee - Al Jaffee, p.2

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Parent Category: Film and the Arts

Category: Interviews

Published on Tuesday, 15 December 2009 03:48

Written by Frank Lovece - intro; Danny FIngeroth - Q & A

Were you at school with Will Elder at that point?

Yeah; when I got into middle school, I met him there. … The two of us, we were brought up into an art class and we were told to draw something, and … we each drew a picture …  and then they informed us that Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia had created a new High School of Music & Art, and that we were chosen because of this slipshod contest that we were involved in. (audience laughs) But it was a turning point. We were sent down to the principal's office – we were usually there for other reasons (audience laughs) – I guess we thought it had some connection to what we had just gone through with the drawing and everything, but I still had no idea. And Willie turned to me with a thick Bronx accent and said, "I tink dere gonna send us to AHT school." (audience laughs). And sure enough he guessed right. And they told us about the mayor's new school and it was really a turning point in our lives, because our other choices were academic, at which we were absolutely total failures, or industrial, which we didn't care about, or a trade school…. These things were so unappealing to us that when the principal said it was an art school we were just blown away.

You went to Music & Art with a bunch of other [future EC and Mad artists].

Harvey Kurtzman was there. Al Feldstein, who later replaced Harvey Kurtzman as editor of Mad. John Severin and a lot of younger ones. Because I was in the first class I was a senior, but there were lots of freshman and juniors whom I didn't get to know who later went on to become very well known in the comic book field and other fine arts.

Did you know the other guys in high school as well? Did you know Kurtzman there?

Yes, I knew him. He was a freshman when I was a senior, so I knew him a little bit, mainly because people pointed him out to me … because of the work this kid was doing. And he was brilliant.

After high school you went to work for Will Eisner, who created The Spirit.

I briefly worked for Eisner. Most of us didn't know what to do with ourselves, because getting into an advertising agency as an artist was very difficult. For one thing, there was a certain amount of prejudice; people with Jewish names or African Americans would have difficulty getting into lily-white ad agencies. And there were certain class distinctions as well. So most of us gave up trying for that. Some of it had to do with the fact that we weren't good enough. But then came the comic book industry which was created to a large extent by Jews, and the feeling was that there wouldn't be any anti-Semitic problems, so that was an opening for many. Not having a lot of original ideas I decided to do Inferior Man, which was a real rip-off of Superman. So I took Inferior Man to Will Eisner and expected him to kick me out of there, but he said, "I think this is a very funny idea," and he hired me to do it as a filler in his comic books; a one- or two-page filler, which I did for a while. And then I went on to glory. (audience laughs) I went on to be out of work I think.

Stan Lee gave you work.

AJ: Yes, Stan Lee was my big break. I took these few things that I had done for Will Eisner up to Stan Lee; someone tipped me off that he had replaced [Joe] Simon and [Jack] Kirby. Stan Lee was a year younger than I was – I was about 19 and he was 18 – and I showed him Inferior Man and he pulled out a script and threw it at me and said, "If you can do this, I'll give you more work," and it was a feature title 'Squat Car Squad', and it was about two bumbling policeman. So I did it and then he said, "Alright, you did a funny job, now start writing scripts and illustrating them." And he never even edited the stuff; I just brought it in and it got published. And we had a very good relationship. (audience laughs)

Then you did "Ziggy Pig & Silly Seal."

The thing that an editor likes more then anything else is for people to take away problems. So if he could say to me, "Write this feature and draw it," and not have to edit it, that was one comic feature that he didn't have a problem with. So he figured he could get another one. He said, "Why don't you create an animal strip?" So I tried to think of an animal that no one had used, and Silly Seal was the one I came up with; no one was doing a seal. Of course the whole thing was ridiculous, because all the characters were fighting the Nazis, and the notion of a seal fighting the Nazis (audience laughs), there was something ludicrous about it. There was a rumor that submarines were in our waters so Silly Seal made a boat out of ice with an ice cannon that shoots snowballs. I mean, how can you live with yourself? (audience laughs) But for some reason it not only caught on …  [but Stan] then said, "Create another one," which was Ziggy Pig and the whole thing was getting crazy. But it came time for me to go into the service, and I noticed that once I was in the Air Force the PX was flooded with comic books. Apparently, there weren't that many soldiers who had gone through college and who were that literate, and … when I saw how they were churning out Silly Seal and Ziggy Pig by the millions, I felt somewhat cheated because I was having to learn to fly an airplane while these guys were making all that money. Even after I returned from service they were still publishing these creatures.

I enjoyed doing [Timely's] "Super Rabbit." I did not create "Super Rabbit"; Stan gave it to me and I enjoyed doing it because I had free rein to write stories with more realistic plots where Super Rabbit had problems that ordinary people have, such as his uniform didn't come back from the cleaners in time to fight crime. Stan Lee did a lot of that stuff later on, with superheroes.

And you also did [Timely/Atlas' teen-humor franchise] "Patsy Walker."

"Patsy Walker" was the yoke around my neck. Y'know, I enjoyed writing "Patsy Walker" but writing for  teenage girls just wasn't my métier. I did it for about five years and it was pretty popular.

Then you got involved with publisher William Gaines and the Mad crew. How did you end up going to Mad?

Kurtzman tried to recruit me to work on Mad when he first started Mad, but despite the fact that "Patsy Walker" wasn't really the kind of work I would prefer to do, I was making pretty good money at it. I did two comic books a month, writing and drawing, and it paid pretty good. But I really envied Kurtzman and my old friend Willie Elder and all the guys who were working for Mad because that stuff would have been more comfortable for me. However, I got into a little contretemps with Stan Lee and we kind of parted ways. Nothing serious; I think we had both reached a point where it was time to change. I called Harvey up and said, "Harvey, I quit ‘Patsy Walker' I'm coming to work for you," and he said, "I just quit Mad.' And that's how he informed me he was going to work for [Hugh] Hefner, and produce Trump which lasted only two issues. And then we did Humbug.

Why did Trump only last two issues?

Hefner was an admirer of Kurtzman's Mad, the comic books, and he kept after Harvey and said, "If you ever want to do a real classy magazine like ‘Mad' but with full-color and all the production, just let me know." So Harvey got into a bit of a conflict with Bill Gaines, the details of which I'm not that familiar with, except that I think Harvey wanted more money and he wanted to operate the magazine, and either Bill didn't want to pay more money or he was satisfied with the magazine he had, and so Harvey I guess, having a commitment from Hefner in his pocket, he decided to leave. But Hefner had to discontinue Trump because the magazine business went into a tailspin at that time. A number of big American magazines like Colliers and a few were  in very big trouble and the banks aren't advancing money. Of course Hefner was working with nothing but bank money; he would put all the profit he made from Playboy right back into the magazine to make it even better, so he was overextended. The banks called in his loans, so Trump fell by the wayside and we were out of work. That's when Harvey talked us into investing our own money into Humbug and we went broke. And this is a success story. (audience laughs)

You were never out of work.

I was never out of work but I was out of income.

How'd you end up back at Humbug?

When Humbug folded, and with having borrowed on my life insurance policy and every penny I had in the bank to put into Humbug and we worked on 11 issues without a single penny of payment, so all of us – a couple of people did get a little bit of money because otherwise they wouldn't have been able to work at all – but most of us borrowed. So when it got to the end of it, we had to go out of business. What do you do at that point? You sit down at your drawing table and  say, "What am I going to do now?" and I had on me a whole batch of scripts I had written and I decided to bite the bullet and call our competitor, Mad, Al Feldstein, and I said, "Al, please don't hang up on me because I went with Harvey," they were at loggerheads, and he said, "I'm not going to hang up on you," and I said, "I wrote a lot of scripts for Humbug  that we couldn't use. Would you be interested?" And he said, "Come on down." The minute I came down there he bought every script; 11 scripts, he bought them all on the spot and then ushered me into Bill Gaines' office and Bill sat me down and went through every issue of Humbug and wanted me to point out the ones that I had written ... and when we finished he walked into Al Feldstein's office and said, "Hire this guy."

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