Al Jaffee, whose career as a working cartoonist spanned more than 70 years, has passed away at the age of 102.
Multiple outlets, from The Washington Post to the New York Times to the BBC and CNN and many more, paid tribute to the record-setting cartoonist. Jaffee died Monday in Manhattan from multiple organ failure, according to his granddaughter, Fani Thomson.
At The Comics Journal, Michael Dean has written an extensive obituary for Jaffee, and I’ll also point you to Alex Dueben’s lengthy post from 2020 on Jaffee when the MAD Magazine icon retired. At the time, Dueben said:
Jaffee had a unique vision of the world. He saw that people said one thing but meant another, said one thing and did another. He saw the world around him as absurd and random, literally put together in one way that could just as easily be put together in other ways. In philosophy, absurdism is the idea that the universe has no meaning and yet people assign meaning to things. Jaffee, though, saw these things as something to satire, to mock. He wasn’t a nihilist. He believed in family and friendship, in work and laughter, in families we find and build.
This is why so much of his work has not aged. Because his worldview, his values, have not aged much. We live in a moment full of such leaders, full of such people, and in many ways, the ability to see through the nonsense, to mock those that behave holier than thou, is more important than ever.
Many in the industry took to Twitter to honor the creator of one of the hallmarks of MAD Magazine over the years, the Fold In: