Al Jaffee

(Excerpt from Al Jaffee interview)

For someone who’s spent more than fifty years contributing to such an American comedic institution, you spent a fair amount of your childhood in a country not necessarily known for its humor.

That’s right. I spent six years in Lithuania, from the age of six to twelve. At that time, most of the Lithuanian Jews lived in ghettoes. I lived in one, too, in a town called Zarasai.

But you weren’t born in Lithuania?

No, I was born in Savannah, Georgia, in 1921. But both of my parents were from Lithuania. My mother was very religious, and she wanted to go back to a place where she felt comfortable. She moved back, and brought me and my three brothers with her. This was in 1927.

How did those six years in Lithuania affect your comic sensibility?

My father remained in America through those six years, and I made him promise to send me American comic strips. Every few months or so, my brothers and I would receive a package of rolled-up Sunday color comics and daily comics. We would just sit there and read them for days and days. My brother Harry, who was also artistic, would take these Sunday comic pages, and we’d cut them up and turn them into little books. A lot of the comic strips were divided into twelve equal panels, so it was very easy to cut these panels into little squares and then place them between two pieces of cardboard and bind them. We loved to make our own comic books. We would provide our own dialogue, maybe with a Lithuanian joke or two.

Most of the comics we received were humorous. Some were adventurous, in the “Little Orphan Annie” mold. You know, there was no TV or radio. So that was pretty much it for us. But I would see humor in everything, even in the religious practices, which didn’t quite register with me.

I found religion sort of funny. There was something that just didn’t make sense about not being able to play ball or not being able to walk too far on the Sabbath. These very strict religious prohibitions against any kind of enjoyment just struck me as being very old-fashioned and strange. Maybe I was bringing my Savannah influence with me; I don’t know. I was sort of straddling these two cultures: the New World and the Old World.

Beyond “Little Orphan Annie,” what were some of your other favorite comic strips then?

I loved “Wash Tubbs,” by Roy Crane. Oh, god, that was one of my favorites. Crane created these comic strips about a mythical kingdom somewhere in Europe, and I could identify with those things. The mythical kingdom that Crane created was closer to the village I was living in at the time than anything else. That resonated pretty well with me. In addition, Crane was an absolute master cartoonist. His work was realistic, but not super-realistic.

How so?

The characters did not look realistic the way “Superman” characters looked. They looked like cartoon characters, but everything was in perfect proportion. And all of the elements, whether it was a train or an automobile, it all looked very real—but in a sort of animated way.

So these drawings looked authentic within their own world, the world of comics, but not authentic in our world, the real world?

Yes.

Did you adopt this style for yourself later in your career?

I did. I don’t consider myself a very good artist. I never have. I really don’t know anatomy. I can’t draw a specific automobile or a specific train out of my imagination, but I think I can do a pretty good job of imagining an automobile or imagining a train. So I can’t compare myself to Roy Crane, because he was head and shoulders above me, but I do have an affinity for the kind of things that he did—when you don’t have to go and get a reference book to draw a Chevrolet and reproduce it in perfect detail.

People might be surprised when I refer to myself as not such a great artist, but I only try to meet the needs of the story. Without having a story to tell, my art has no meaning. Rembrandt may have been able to achieve meaning without a story, but I can’t.

Then again, if you put a Rembrandt-style artist into Mad, the reader would focus so much on the artist’s style that it would overwhelm the comedy and the writing.

It’s sort of complicated to figure this out, but I really feel that the idea has to precede the artwork, and if the idea says this is a fantasy …well, then there’s no point in going out and getting reference materials. You just draw what’s in your head…