Employee Of The Month

As you enjoy your Thanksgiving vacation or are traveling back from it, you will be grateful to hear from fascinating, fun, and formidably talented illustrator and writer Al Jaffee. We met at his studio, where his MAD mind is as creative as ever, even if he says he's not as insanely prolific at age 93. (Uh, he's doing more than most folks at any age.) Jaffee is working on his fantastically detailed and vibrant illustrations for Sponge Bob Square Pants to MAD Magazine to his long running cartoon for the Lubavitch. We spoke about religion as Al is not religious, but spent most of his childhood in bleak Jewish towns in Lithuania and narrowly escaped the Holocaust. We also spoke about his career through the decades, which started when he entered LaGuardia High School. Jaffee shared his insight into how illustrators, writers, and cartoonists created a field that didn't exist. He reveals why Jews changed their names when hustling for gigs pre-World War II to what it was like to work with Stan Lee pre-Marvel....