Best of the Usual Gang of Idiots

Is today Al Jaffee’s hundredth birthday?

No, the candle store was having a buy one, get 99 free sale.

No, he always walks around tooting a horn and wearing a paper hat.

No, it’s Shakespeare’s birthday, everyone makes that mistake.

Happy @jaffee100!

Art by Drew Friedman pic.twitter.com/SR2S4FFoae

— Michael Tisserand (@m_tisserand) March 13, 2021

An excellent article in the Chicago Reader about cartoonist Johnny Sampson being, at press, the last MAD artist standing (including lots of Jaffee content).

RIP Frank Jacobs:

Longtime MAD magazine writer Frank Jacobs passed away this morning at the age of 91. When Harvey Kurtzman stepped down as editor of MAD and was replaced by Al Feldstein, Frank was the first writer Feldstein bought material from and over the years, he and subsequent editors bought a lot of it from Frank.

That first piece of his for MAD appeared in #33, cover-dated June of 1957. He had work in 312 issues, making him the seventh most-prolific contributor to the magazine ever. (Beating him out: Jaffee, Aragonés, DeBartolo, Drucker, Coker and Berg.) Frank's last new work seems to have been in #529, cover-dated October of 2014. Work of his is reprinted in almost every issue of the last few years.