Al Jaffee

Al Jaffee — born Abraham Jaffee on March 13, 1921, and who lived to be 102 before passing on April 10, 2023 — built one of the most durable careers in American cartooning. The Guinness World Records recognized his run from 1942 to 2020 as the longest career of any comic artist on record.

Though his early work spanned titles such as *Patsy Walker*, *Krazy Komics*, and *Miss America Magazine*, Jaffee found his permanent home at the satirical magazine *Mad*, where he contributed for an extraordinary 65 years — making him its longest-running contributor by a wide margin. In the roughly fifty years between April 1964 and April 2013, just a single issue appeared without new material from him. His signature creation there, the Mad Fold-in, became one of the most recognizable recurring features in American magazine publishing: a back-page illustration that, when folded inward, revealed a hidden image contradicting the original.

Peers held his draftsmanship in high regard. *Peanuts* creator Charles M. Schulz offered the compact assessment that "Al can cartoon anything," while *New Yorker* cartoonist Arnold Roth called him one of the greats of his generation. In 2008, the National Cartoonists Society honored Jaffee with its Reuben Award for Cartoonist of the Year — a fitting capstone to a career that, by any measure, outlasted nearly everyone around him.