The day Al Jaffee passed away recently at the tragically young age of 102, I found one of his books - Al Jaffee's Next Book - at a local second hand store, and had to get it. I'm so glad I did, because it reminded me of the sheer strength of his line art.
His line was usually softened in his wonderful fold-ins, and any colour work for covers and such were the same. But in the cold black and white of a 50-year-old paperback, it's as thick and bold as ever. Somewhere in the Mad spectrum, Jaffe was between the rushed vitality of an Aragones and the meticulous detail of a Drucker. As confident as anything Don Martin ever produced, but looser and more dynamic, with the absolute possibility that he only needed to do that line once, because he always got it just right first time
I love those fold-ins as much as anybody, and the snappiest answers to the dumbest questions still make me laugh, but when it came to the real strength of Al Jaffee, it was all right there in some simple lines.
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