Al Jaffee's Tall Tales: skinny comics with snappy humor

Al Jaffee's Tall Tales collects the best out of over 2,200 "Tall Tales" daily strips that Mad Magazine's Al Jaffee drew for the Herald Tribune syndicate from 1957 to 1963. Jaffee conceived of Tall Tales while in desperate economic straits, and hit upon a winning formula for breaking into the lucrative comics syndicate game: rather than drawing a traditional horizontal strip that would compete with the existing material, he opted for a seven-inch-tall vertical strip, which gave editors a lot more flexibility as to where in the paper the strip would run. The tall format is a natural for wordless "double-take" sight-gags whose effect lies in the fact that your eye can't take in the whole strip in one go, so there's a little comic shock that comes after studying the page for a second or two.

All the strips in the book are at least cute, and many are fantastically funny (I like the posh "Fresh Seafood" restaurant in which a tuxedoed waiter standing by a table for two is signalling with two fingers to a nearby fisherman in a straw hat on a dock, who's grinning and giving a thumbs-up sign; and the first strip in the book, which shows two men laying checkered tiles from opposite ends of a long corridor, and one of them has just realized that their checkers is not going to line up, and has a look of perfect horror on his face). There's a charming foreword by Stephen Colbert, who is an Al Jaffee megafan (as it turns out), and Jaffee himself has given us a page or two of origin-story for the piece.

But the meat of this is just page after page of tall, skinny sight gags, executed in the classic Jaffee style that MAD Magazine nuts know down to our bones. This is a fine, thin little book and funny besides.

Tall Tales on Amazon

• [Simon Greenwood]

  That cartoon isn’t about the tile-layers running out. Look again at the tiles that they’ve got left…

• [David]

  If that’s an indication of the type of comics in his book, I’m definitely gonna get it.

• [reglobb]

  hey! cool tie!!

• [Anonymous]

  Optimized for the iPhone!

• [WeightedCompanionCube]

  Doesn’t matter what tiles they have left, there’s no way to keep the checkerboard pattern.

• [burningfencepost]

  Picture story genius a la McCay or Feininger.
  I’m in.

• [Kabur Naj]

  I love BoingBoing, but I’ve got to don my pedant hat for a second:

  It’s “foreword”, not “foreward”. I’m starting to think that it wasn’t just a simple accident that you let JPB spell it that way in his introduction to “Content”… a spelling reform conspiracy, perhaps?

  Oh, and while I’m picking nits, “their checkers is not” grammatically correct, but “their checkers are”.

  (I wonder where rabid blog-commenters fall into the mix for new authorship/editorship models. :D http://www.archive.org/download/CoryDoctorow-Content_268/20-Wikipedia-AGenuineHG2G-MinusTheEditors_64kb.mp3 )

• [soupisgoodfood]

  I got the joke straight away, but then again, I am a web and graphic designer and have actually come across this a couple of times when doing work. There are some patterns and designs that just don’t work well with CSS layouts.

• [Kabur Naj]

  BTW, this looks like a lovely little book. I thought at first that it was a collection of Sergio Aragones’ best margin doodles from Mad magazine, then I looked a little closer at the style (and, um, the cover). If they ever reissue this book, I hope they add a few of Aragones’ little margin strips for every one of Jaffee’s and make a cool fractal statement in the process. I’d buy that for a dollar.

• [PaulR]

  The two tilers should talk to Escher. He could help them…

  Or Zeno.

• [Paul Dreyer]

  #10: You’re not saying they’ll be… saved… by… Zeno? Saved by Zeno!

  Fricking Toyota.

• [Stefan Jones]

  Solutions:

  * A line of solid white or solid black tiles
  * Split tiles in half and connect the pattern that way.

  Sorry, I had to get that out of the way.

  Jaffe does great stuff. I loved his MAD magazine articles about recycling and dog-waste disposal.

• [skrpune]

  @13 – dang nabbit, you beat me to it! I’d personally go for the split tiles, it was my first instinct.

  Having worked in construction for 9 years, gaffes like this don’t make me laugh, they just remind me of snafus that had to be cleaned up!

• [kip w]

  Thanks for the reminder! I hadn’t kicked myself recently for once having had the 60s paperback collection of this strip and letting it go when I was in a series of moves. I’ll get on that right away.

  Split tiles? I’d put in a row of black and white, shifted a half tile width over. Face it, whatever you do, it’ll still stick out.

• [Takuan]

  wooo! cool scroll action!!

• [slida]

  That took me a minute… it’s almost… philosophical in nature.

• [Takuan]

  Simple. The tiles are correct. Or your career is over. What do you see?