Features Podcasts Family Video Comics Music Tech Science Books Film & TV Games ✚

Jill

Al Jaffee Biography and Art Exhibition

Douglas Rushkoff at 12:42 pm Wed, Oct 6, 2010

— FEATURED —

Book Review

The Man Who Laughs: grotesque Victor Hugo potboiler was the basis for The Joker

Feature

Eurovision 2013: An American in London

Book Review

The Twelve-Fingered Boy - mesmerizing YA horror novel

— FOLLOW US —

Boing Boing is on Twitter and Facebook. Subscribe to our RSS feed or daily email.

 

— POLICIES —

Except where indicated, Boing Boing is licensed under a Creative Commons License permitting non-commercial sharing with attribution

 

— FONTS —

Tweet
Kindle
Jaffee.p28.EXCLUSIVE.png The new biography, Al Jaffee's Mad Life by Mary Lou Weisman has just been released by HarperCollins. The book is embedded with new art by Jaffee himself, turning the whole thing into something like a pictorial, annotated graphic novel. Above, a Boing Boing exclusive preview of a page of art from the book. Jaffee, 89, is best known for his fold-ins for Mad Magazine and his ongoing series of "Snappy Answers to Stupid Questions." The book chronicles one of the most compellingly bizarre and burdensome childhood's imaginable in a shtetl in Lithuania - which probably explains the brilliance of his escapism as well as the sense of alienation embedded in his cultural satire. (Whatever doesn't kill us makes us more delightfully mutant. Also opening this month, Is This the Al Jaffee Art Exhibit? October 5th, 2010 - January 30th, 2011at the Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art. Or catch him live at New York Comiccon on Saturday October 9 at 4:15.

Winner of the Media Ecology Association's first Neil Postman award for Career Achievement in Public Intellectual Activity, Douglas Rushkoff is an author, teacher, and documentarian who focuses on the ways people, cultures, and institutions create, share, and influence each other's values. He is technology and media commentator for CNN, and has taught and lectured around the world about media, technology, culture and economics. His new book, Program or Be Programmed: Ten Commands for a Digital Age, a followup to his Frontline documentary, Digital Nation. His last book, an analysis of the corporate spectacle called Life Inc., was also made into a short, award-winning film.

More at Boing Boing

Eurovision 2013: An American in London

The technology that links taxonomy and Star Trek

  • forgeweld

    Great find, Doug-thank you. Al Jaffee is such a brilliant illustrator and witty character. God bless him.

  • License Farm

    Speaking of which, Doug, will YOU be at the NYCC this weekend?

  • acb

    The image above looks much more old-school and European than Jaffee’s usual MAD work; it could almost be Heath Robinson or Hergé.

  • Douglas Rushkoff

    @3 I was thinking the same thing. Most of the art from the book is like that.

    @1 I am supposed to go but now it looks like I may have to stay home for this comiccon. I’ve been traveling a lot and have to put in some home time.