A few weeks ago I mentioned the upcoming “MAD’s Greatest Artists” release featuring the great Sergio Aragonés, which is going to be a must have for the ol’ bookshelf. Well, it looks like the ol’ bookshelf is going to need some extra room this fall for what is sure to be not only another gem about another legendary MAD great, but one that is truly as individual and unique as the artist himself.

A biography of the incomparable Al Jaffee is scheduled for release this fall from HarperCollins. Here is the promotional blurb:

Al Jaffee’s inventive work has enlivened the pages of Mad since 1955. To date he has pickled three generations of American kids in the brine of satire, and continues to bring millions of childhoods to untimely ends with the knowledge that parents are hypocrites, teachers are dummies, politicians are liars, and life isn’t fair. Eighty-eight year-old Jaffee is probably best known as the inventor of the “fold-in” which he started in 1964 and has been doing ever since. He is the author of eight volumes of Snappy Answers to Stupid Questions, two of which have sold over two million copies.

Although Jaffee has become a cultural icon, the most compelling part of his life story has yet to be told. A synopsis of Jaffee’s formative years reads like a comic strip of traumatic cliff-hangers with cartoons by Jaffee and captions by Freud. By the time he was 12 years old, Jaffee was separated from his father, uprooted from his home in Savannah, Georgia, transplanted for a year in a shtetl in Lithuania, rescued by his father, returned to America, taken yet again by his mother back to the shtetl, this time for four years, and once again rescued by his father even as Hitler was on the march. His flamboyant perverse youth has made him the MAD man he is today: an artist, a writer, a raconteur, an arrested adolescent and an alien.

The book will feature some 40 reproductions of some of his fantastic artwork done for MAD and other clients and projects. Of course that would just be your typical biography, and nothing about Al Jaffee is typical. True to form, Al is doing something special. He has created 65 originals for the book, illustrating his own life story and childhood memories.

Check out the promotional page of Al Jaffee’s MAD Life for more details and a sneak peek!!

Q: Are there any people, either friends or celebrities, you’ve drawn so many times you could do a pretty good job of drawing them purely from memory without using any sort of reference?

A: My first real job in published cartooning (if you can call working for the infamous NOW Comics a “real job”) was drawing a comic book called Married… with Children. I drew somewhere around 600 pages of that comic from 1991-1995. Even though it’s been 15 years since I did my last drawing of Ed O’Neill and Katie Segal as Al and Peg Bundy, I can still do pretty respectable caricature of them right out of my head:

I did that in about 10 minutes this morning from nothing but memory… not as accurate as I used to be perhaps, but not too far off either.

In fact, I can still draw the entire living room and den area with all the furniture in the proper place and the decor without looking up any reference. I have an organic CGI image map of that room burned into my brain after drawing it from many different angles over and over and over.

I feel the need to exonerate NOW Comics somewhat on my behalf, because although they had a bad reputation for paying people late or not at all, I got paid for almost everything I ever did for them (eventually) with the exception of about 12 pages of the last issue of “Lotto Fever” that never got finished or published anyway. There were a lot of good people working for NOW that I enjoyed working with, and that experience was very important in my career. You can read about the whole sorted saga here if you are so inclined.

Thanks to Ed Placencia for the question. If you have a question you want answered for the mailbag about cartooning, illustration, MAD Magazine, caricature or similar, e-mail me and I’ll try and answer it here!

Click for a closer look…

From the Freelance Files:

When doing freelance work for a lot of different clients it is inevitable you’ll have one of those “Huh? Really??” moments every once and awhile when something unexpected happens on a job. One of those happened to me last week after I finished the artwork for a movie poster for a political documentary film by director Ray Griggs who did the “Super Capers” film I worked on.

I had done a considerable amount of artwork for the movie itself, which amid interviews of politicians and others has three CGI animated segments that I did all the character design and storyboards for and designed a promotional bobblehead toy as well. When Ray asked me to do the movie poster, a relatively simple image of Obama in the classic James Montgomery Flagg “Uncle Sam” pose my first thought was I needed to stick to the same sort of style as the animated characters and the bobblehead, but Ray had other ideas. He wanted something that stuck closer to the original Flagg style in the famous poster. Flagg’s loose and sketchy watercolor look was not going to work very well with a cartoony sort of image, so I ended up doing a richer, painterly look but keeping with a more realistic caricature depiction of Obama as Ray wanted. Ray liked the final results.

The “Huh? Really??” moment came a few days later after some of the investors in the film saw the mock up of the poster with my artwork in place. It seems they thought as I originally did… that it made no sense to have a totally different type of look to the Obama on the movie poster when there was already a visual identity to the film’s imagery (i.e. my cartoon caricature of Obama from the bobblehead and CGI animations). Thus, I had to redo the poster using instead my more cartoony caricature of Obama. At an enormous 29″ x 40″ in size this took me an entire day to do, even though it was in comparison a much simpler image than the painterly original shown above. I can’t show you the new image yet but the posters should be released sometime this summer.

Even though it did make more sense to stick with the same image style as depicted in the film, I much preferred the look of the painted Uncle Obama shown here… it looks more like it belongs on a movie poster. If we were doing the cartoony style we should have done a funny scene with multiple characters in it ala “Animal House” or “The Bad News Bears”. Ah well.

On the other hand, what do movie studio people know?? Not much considering when a legend like Drew Struzan does the art for the poster of a movie like this one:

…yet the brain wizards at Lionsgate go with this piece of PhotoShop crap for the DVD cover???!?:

Riggggght. Good thinking. Sheesh.

Welcome to July! As far as Comic Con goes later this month, the schedule for the MAD panel and signings on Saturday are all official. Here’s the skinny…

SATURDAY, JULY 24

10:00-11:00-  Mad about MAD!
MAD Magazine has established itself as the original and most imitated and influential satirical publication across generations.  This fall, MAD returns to TV screens with a new show for the next generation!  Come join MAD Magazine editor John Ficarra, MAD Art Director Sam Viviano, legendary MAD artist Sergio Aragones, contemporary MAD artist Tom Richmond, MAD Story Editor/Producer Kevin Shinick and your host, MAD Creative Exec Peter Girardi, for a light-hearted look at the future of an American institution. Room 7AB

11:15-12:00-  MAD Signing at the DC Comics Booth!
Meet MAD Magazine editor John Ficarra, MAD Art Director Sam Viviano, MAD artists Sergio Aragones and Tom Richmond, The WB and Cartoon Network’s MAD Animated show Story Editor/Producer Kevin Shinick and Creative Exec Peter Girardi. Booth #1915

4:15-5:00-  MAD Signing at the Warner Bros. Booth!
With MAD Magazine editor John Ficarra, MAD Art Director Sam Viviano, MAD artists Sergio Aragones and Tom Richmond, The WB and Cartoon Network’s MAD Animated show Story Editor/Producer Kevin Shinick and Creative Exec Peter Girardi.

Barring schedule conflicts, injury, sudden death or bad fish tacos for lunch we should all be there as detailed above. I’ll also be selling MAD originals, signing stuff and drawing caricatures here and again at the National Cartoonists Society booth, schedules to be posted on site. No word yet on if we’ll be doing anything with the Cartoon Network.