Al Jaffee's Mad Life A Biography by Mary-Lou Weisman Illustrated by Al Jaffee

Al Jaffee's Mad Life A Biography by Mary-Lou Weisman Illustrated by Al Jaffee

Al Jaffee is a cartoonist for Mad magazine.  He also has over sixty cartoon books he has written.  He is best known for the fold-ins at the back of Mad Magazine.  He illustrated this biography with a mix of slice of life comics about his own life and light humor comics.  I like the slightly exaggerated style of the cartoons.  They remind me a bit of a kind of slightly guilty pleasure.  This book covers his whole life.

The story starts with his childhood which is quite poignant and hard.  It starts with him moving from Savannah Georgia to live with his mother in a Lithuanian shtetl (small jewish town).  Then it covers his return to live in New York city.  The story is one of hardship and suffering.  He ends up leaving his mother behind as the Jewish holocaust starts.

This biography has quite a bit of mature themes in it; his brother going mad, another brother having extreme disabilities, and being separated from his mother.  He often describes himself as a cut up and a bit out of control.  This is illustrated by a variety of escapades throughout his life which can be both ridiculous and shocking

The thing which ultimately saves him is humor.  He describes reading comics his father sends him as a child and deciding that there is a career for him in comics when he sees advertisements by Dr. Seuss.  There are quite a few cartoons from Al Jaffee's early career in this book including many from Mad magazine.  The juxtaposition between everyday life and silly humor fits well with the writing.

In what I consider the second half of the book, he gets his break when he is accepted for the New York High School for Music and Art as it is first opening.  There he meets Harvey Kurtzman and some of the early figures in comics.  This biography describes his work for many important people in the comics industry.

The second half of the book touches on the history of comic books.  It is quite entertaining.  I rather liked a few of the wordless comics on page 180.  I also like the inventiveness in this book. Al Jaffe attributes this to having very little when he was a child.  He had to make his own toys.  There are interesting cartoons of home made fishing poles, rafts, a toy truck and other toys.

This book is not in the least bit academic in style.  It is full of anecdotes, humor, and sad stories. There is no index and no lists of recommended titles.  There are some photographs from the authors life, many cartoons in full color from both the auhor's life and Mad magazine.  The book is printed on heavy stock paper.  It is published by Harper Collins under the itbooks imprint.  This is a story that makes you think.

Daily Thoughts 11/11/2010 (Al Jaffee's Mad Life, Find That File)

Cartoonist Al Jaffee at the New York Comic Convention in Manhattan, October 9, 2010, Photograph by Luigi Novi, Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported, Found on Wikimedia
Daily Thoughts 11/11/2010

I finished reading Al Jaffee's Mad Life last night.  I was reading about his career as a cartoonist. It is quite interesting because he both writes, draws, and colors his cartoons.  I liked the wordless panels which he had in the book as well as a few of the fold-ins which he did for Mad Magazine.  The book was very entertaining.



Web Bits


Voters Say Yes to Libraries, Elected Officials Say No http://blog.libraryjournal.com/ljinsider/2010/11/11/voters-say-yes-to-libraries-elected-officials-say-no/


Find That File is a new file search engine on the web http://www.findthatfile.com 

Daily Thoughts 11/10/2010 (Al Jaffee's Mad Life, The Works of Dean Swift)

Gustav Adolph Hennig, Lesendes Mädchen, 1828

Daily Thoughts 11/10/2010

Today has been another quiet day.  I checked the displays to make sure things were in order.  I also made sure that everything was reading for SCORE.  We are having another session today.  I am doing the graphic novels club today as well.  The SCORE sessions went well today.  I am happy with the results.  I did not have that many people for the graphic novels club specifically.  There were eight people from the trading card club who were there already, some of them took a few graphic novels.  Plus we had a couple people come in to look.  Several graphic novels from the Sandman series went out written by Neil Gaiman.

I am still thinking about doing a poetry program in January if it works out.  The book, The Referral Engine Teaching Your Business To Market Itself  by John Jantsch has come in for me to read.

I am going to have to pass on the Content Strategy meeting tonight.  I will be doing my regular activities.  I did a little bit of work for the gala tomorrow with the displays in the rotunda.  We were putting up pictures from the library in the glass display cases.  Much of it is local history.  There are pictures all the way back to the building of our current building which started construction in 1896.  The first library in our city was in a school house, it was in 1854.  We have eight books from 1854 that I can find so far.  One that especially caught my attention was The Works of Dean Swift Embracing Gullivers Travels, Tale of A Tub, Battle of the Books, Etc. With A Life of the Author by Reverend John Mitford And Copious Notes  by W.C. Taylor LL.D., New York, Leavitt  & Allen, c1854  This is a link to the book on Google Books http://bit.ly/a60y2H

On the train home, I read some more of Al Jaffee's Mad Life.  The biography is one of incredible difficulty with lots of humor and hardship.  He describes his mother staying behind in Lithuania just before the start of World War II in the the shtetls.  He also describes his fathers troubles with keeping and holding jobs.  He moves from place to place, relatives house to relatives house, alternating between New York and Lithuania. The one constant throughout the story is humor, inventiveness, and the absurdity of life. The other constant is light hearted mischief and cartoons.  Al Jaffee does many full color cartoons throughout the book about incidents in his life and people from his family.  He is best known for his work for Mad magazine.

Web Bit

Something provocative for you librarians out there. http://www.zdnet.com/blog/perlow/digital-underclass-what-happens-when-the-libraries-die/14554 Reminds me a bit of the Fox news episode on libraries. Silos anyone, giant bricks full of books. Are we as librarians going to be user experience designers, metadata taxonomists, digital image repositiry specialists, information architects, or content strategists in this brave new world.  Maybe we can also become emerging technology advocates, providers of data to the underclass as preventers of the digital divide.  Think on this one.