Date: Friday, Nov 15, 2024
Lots 301 - 453

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Is This the Al Jaffee Art Auction?

Auction of the Personal Collection of MAD Magazine Cartoonist Al Jaffee on November 15, 2024
Original Artwork, Memorabilia, Ephemera, Studio Furniture & More
Featured Section of the Stage & Screen Auction

NEW YORK, NY -- Doyle was MADly excited to offer the personal collection of the award-winning comic artist and author Al Jaffee. The auction of over one-hundred and fifty lots was held on November 15, 2024.

Al Jaffee, a cultural icon best known for his decades of work for MAD Magazine, holds the world record for longest career as a cartoonist. Working continuously from 1942 until 2020, 78 years in total, his career spans the history of comics from the Golden Age to present day. He died in 2021 at the age of 102.

Early Years
Abraham (later changed to Allan) Jaffee was born in Savannah, Georgia in 1921, and had a turbulent childhood. His mother uprooted him from his home and brought him to a Lithuanian shtetl called Zarasai, where he would spend six years in a world of gas lamps and outhouses. After his father took him back to America, they settled in New York City, which would remain his home for much of the rest of his life. He attended the High School for Music and Art, where he began to develop his artistic ability and met some of his future MAD colleagues, including Will Elder and Harvey Kurtzman.

His first feature, Inferior Man, a rip-off of Superman starring an accountant with delusions of grandeur, was bought by Will Eisner’s Military Comics in 1941. He then went on to work with Stan Lee at Marvel’s predecessor, Timely Comics. While there, he created Ziggy Pig and Silly Seal. His career was interrupted by WWII, however. He volunteered because, in Jaffee’s words, “I was A-1, prime meat” (Weisman, Mad Life, p.151). After a stint in the army, where found himself drawing illustrations for booklets, diagrams for training aids, and comic strips for army publications, he returned to Timely, creating Super Rabbit, another animal funny comic, and drawing Patsy Walker, a romance comic.

MAD Magazine and the Fold-In
Despite his early successes, Jaffee’s heart was always in humor comics, so he left Timely in 1955 to join his classmate Harvey Kurtzman at MAD Magazine. His first stint there was short-lived, however – he left MAD with Kurtzman a year later to join the Hugh Hefner financed humor magazine, Trump, which ran for only two issues, and then Humbug, which ran for eleven issues. During this time he also began drawing Tall Tales, an innovative vertically-oriented strip that was internationally syndicated by The New York Herald Tribune.

After these influential but ultimately doomed ventures, he rejoined “the usual gang of idiots” at MAD in 1958, where he would spend the rest of his career working as both a writer and an artist. While there, he created some of the most iconic recurring strips in the magazine, such as “Snappy Answers to Stupid Questions,” the anti-Vietnam war strip “Hawks and Doves,” and the Rube Goldberg inspired “Al Jaffee’s MAD Inventions.” In 1964, however, Jaffee struck comedic gold when he created his first ever “MAD Fold-In.” It became a signature feature of the magazine, and Jaffee went on to draw over five-hundred Fold-Ins, the inside back cover of nearly every issue of MAD published between 1964 and 2020.

Jaffee explained how he came up with the idea in his introduction The MAD Fold-In Collection, which reprints every Fold-In from 1964-2010: “I pick up a copy of Playboy, and can’t help but focus on its iconic centerfold… The lightbulb above my head flashed even brighter as I blurted out ‘That’s it! They all do expensive color FOLD-OUTS, so we’ll do cheap, crappy FOLD-INS!”… I went into MAD editor Al Feldstein’s office with it and said ‘Al, I’ve got a funny idea but I don’t think you’ll buy it. It mutilates the magazine’… He went into publisher Gaine’s office and soon came back. “We’re going to do it. Bill said that if a kid mutilates the magazine for the Fold-In he’ll buy another one for his collection.” As far as I was concerned this was, like many of my ideas, a one-shot sale… I never dreamed it would turn into a life’s work… Through the years, however, the Fold-In has changed with the times. It's no longer cheap and black and white on crummy paper, but is as brightly printed as any of the fold-outs that inspired it” (The MAD Fold-In Collection, Vol. I). Jaffee, a keen observer and expert satirist, frequently used topical humour in his Fold-Ins to examine American social, political, and cultural issues. Looking back through his extensive oeuvre, Jaffee’s comics and Fold-Ins form a veritable catalog of important American issues and events throughout the second half of the twentieth century.

The Personal Collection of Al Jaffee
Among the highlights of The Personal Collection of Al Jaffee are a large group of original artworks for MAD strips dating from the 1960s and 70s, including “Basebrawl,” “MAD Medical Mother Goose,” “Snappy Answers…” “The MAD Hate Book,” “MAD Inventions,” and “Hawks and Doves.” Many of the strips are complete, and they often include production overlays. There are over sixty finished original artworks for MAD Fold-Ins, needless to say the largest tranche ever to come to market. The collection also contains artwork by Jaffee’s MAD colleagues, including two “MAD Books,” both of which were presented to Jaffee by his colleagues in honor of his achievements. They feature original unpublished writings and artworks by Bill Gaines, Jack Davis, Serigo Aragones, and the rest of “The Gang of Idiots.” There is also a large and varied archive that contains preliminary notes and sketches for Jaffee’s published and unpublished comics, original artwork he published in other magazines, his numerous achievement awards, his library of books and comics, his studio’s drafting table and artist’s supplies, and much more.

In Conclusion
If you grew up reading MAD and, despite having led such a misspent childhood, you still have your wits about you (and perhaps some disposable income too), then you’d be stark raving MAD not to take this opportunity to acquire a treasure directly from one of the all-time greatest, and hands-down funniest, cartoonists to ever put pen to paper. As Stan Lee said, “I can do naught but heap the most glowing praise upon his pointy little head. This man, this creative titan, this Al Jaffee who walks among us, has a record which few can equal. Never, within human memory, has he precipitated a global war, committed genocide, or been incarcerated for jay-walking. He also writes and draws funny stuff” (The Stan Lee Universe, p. 38).

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