Editor’s Note: This article was published originally on February 21, 2016. We are revisiting it on the occasion of Al Jaffee’s 100th birthday. On a snowy February afternoon, Al Jaffee, my childhood hero, invited me into his well-lit studio in Midtown Manhattan. The walls were covered with his drawings, images from Mad Magazine and a…
(JTA) — The satirical Mad magazine, known for its iconic mascot Alfred E. Neuman, will soon be coming off newsstands and will stop publishing new content. DC Entertainment announced Wednesday that starting after issue 10 – it is currently on issue 8 after rebooting from issue 1 last year – there will be no new…
Editor’s note: Mad magazine will soon be coming off newsstands and will stop publishing new content. DC Entertainment announced Wednesday that starting after issue 10 there will be no new content except for year-end specials. We are republishing this article from 2016 in honor of the magazine’s legacy. On a snowy February afternoon, Al Jaffee,…
Moses clutches the Ten Commandments in one hand and tries to hail a taxicab with the other; Yahweh greets Jesus with a “Shalom,”and the latter replies: “Shalom yourself!” These are typical japes from the French comics artist Gotlib (born Marcel Mordekhaï Gottlieb in 1934 to a Romanian-Hungarian Jewish family). “The Worlds of Gotlib,” an exhibit…
Al Feldstein, a longtime editor of U.S. humor magazine Mad who helped push it to its peak in popularity in the 1970s, died at his home in Montana, according to a funeral home announcement. He was 88. Feldstein, who was editor of Mad during its 1960s-1970s heyday and also a comic book writer and artist,…
It was a thrill to learn recently that one of my favorite Mad magazine artists, the legendary Al Jaffee, would give his personal papers to Columbia University. Among those treasures are a massive cache of Jaffee’s much-loved Mad fold-in cartoons and notebooks of ideas Jaffee never even submitted for publication. But the most intriguing part…
Drawn to New York: An Illustrated Chronicle of Three Decades in New York City By Peter Kuper, Introduction by Eric Drooker PM Press, 208 pages, $29.95 This oversized, four-color 30-year compendium of comics, magazine illustrations, painting and sketchbook work by the artist best known for his “Spy vs Spy” pages in Mad Magazine, is stunning…
Corpse on the Imjin! And Other Stories By Harvey Kurtzman, Edited by Gary Groth Fantagraphics, 227 pages, $28.99 Harvey Kurtzman (1924-1993) is today remembered as the Bronx-born genius editor who invented Mad Magazine, the most pervasive satirical influence of the 20th century. That single claim-to-fame is hard to avoid, but Kurtzman’s larger role in the…
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