The Personal Collection of Al Jaffee

Original artwork for 'Inferior Man,' published as a one-page filler in Will Eisner's Military Comics, circa 1941. Pencil, ink, and gouache on paperboard, tape border to verso reinforcing edges, the drawing taped to a coated paper mat, with a printed label below the drawing also taped to the mat, the label reads, "First attempt at creating comic book feature circa 1941. Published as 1-page filler in Will Eisner's 'Military Comics';" 11 x 9 1/2 inches. Signed (lc). Framed. Light soiling, a few pin-holes around the edges mostly at the upper left corner, near fine despite age and handling.

This drawing of Inferior Man is an important survival from the very earliest days of Al Jaffee's career, drawn shortly after he graduated high school. It is the first drawing by Jaffee ever published, and the comic strip that followed, which ran for seven issues in Military Comics, was the only one he ever created for Will Eisner. Inferior Man was a satirical humor comic that Jaffee drew fourteen years before he started working at MAD, anticipating the trajectory of his career. The strip was far ahead of its time, one of the earliest to parody the superhero genre, and it foreshadowed a major recurring theme in Jaffee's oeuvre. He would often look for ways to subvert the conventions of comic books, either through their genres or formats, first with this anti-superhero, Inferior Man, and later by turning the newspaper strip on its side for Tall Tales, and inverting the magazine centerfold for MAD Fold-Ins. It all began here.

Jaffee and his biographer explain how Inferior Man was published, and what the strip meant to Al, in Mad Life:

"After a year of trying to find himself in all the wrong places, Al began taking his portfolio around to comic-book publishers' offices. The day he got an appointment with Will Eisner - best known at the time for his crime-fighting hero, The Spirit - Al arrived at the beginning of his cartoon career. Eisner flipped quickly through Al's drawings but stopped when he got to Inferior Man, Al's satiric response to the wildly popular Superman.

'When you do satire, you have to have a jumping-off point. With Inferior Man I felt I was on solid ground.' Inferior Man, a.k.a. Courtney Fudd, was an accountant by day and an anti-superhero by night. His outfit included dingy underwear emblazoned with the letter I, garters to hold up his droopy socks, and, of course, a cape. He had no muscles and he didn't fly - he flitted. 'Inferior Man would prance around looking for crimes, but if the crime was more than he could handle, he would step into a phone booth, change into street clothes, and blend into the crowd.' Al, a self-confessed loser, claims a very personal relationship to Inferior Man. "When you have people who are oppressed, whether its Jews living in places where people don't want them, like Jews in Zarasai, or slaves living for masters in Savannah, about the only amusement you have is to see your oppressor from a satirical point of view. You make fun of him. You make yourself feel superior by pretending to be them and exposing their excesses. Inferior Man is my alter ego.'

Eisner rejected Al's idea that Inferior Man should be an accountant with delusions of grandeur. Not surprisingly, Eisner, who was packaging Military Comics, preferred that Inferior Man be somebody with a lowly job in the army, a quartermaster, perhaps, who handed out uniforms. Since Will was paying ten dollars a week, and since the ingratiating pleaser in Al found it almost impossible to say no, Al tried to breathe life into Eisner's idea. He failed, and by failing, found out that his learned passivity had its limits... 'I'm not comfortable having somebody tell me what to do. It's not difficult to do a one-shot of somebody's idea, but if that idea is not alive in you, how do you do the second shot?'" (Weisman, Mad Life, pp. 146-148, with this drawing illustrated on p. 147).