“Is this a follow-up post about Al Jaffee?”
“No, it’s my grocery list. The internet will publish anything.”

In an earlier post about MAD Magazine‘s Al Jaffee, I reprinted a biographical piece he’d written in the early 1960s.

Jaffee wrote that he spent 6 years in Lithuania as a child with his Mom. His Dad stayed in the US but dutifully mailed Al’s beloved comic strips to him overseas. The story sounded like a fascinating morsel and I wanted to know more. And there is more. A lot more and it reads like a page-turning thriller.

Danny Fingeroth, the Senior VP of Education at MoCCA, the Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art in New York, sent me a note about the post and told me about Al’s upcoming biography, Al Jaffee’s MAD Life. The book, written by Mary Lou Weisman, “covers the story of his chilling six years in Lithuania with his mother (as well as the rest of his life and career, of course),” says Fingeroth. And what a life that was (and still is, fortunately).

There’s a bigger snippet about Al’s Lithuanian adventure - excerpted from the book - at the Harpercollins website.

And if you want even more, there’s an interview with Al where he talks about how he managed to survive in a place where he didn’t know anyone and didn’t speak the language. If you guessed that cartooning helped him out, you’d be right.

Jaffee will be the subject of a MoCCA exhibition, curated by Fingeroth and another friend of mine Arie Kaplan. It’ll debut sometime this fall. Kickstarter is one of the ways the exhibit – which came together on short notice – is being sponsored. If you’d like to donate, get over there.

The book is out September 28 (probably a little earlier in some locations, and you can always pre-order from Amazon and the other online retailers). Jaffee did 70 new illustrations for it, and that alone makes it a must-have for fans.

One of my favorite bios ever is The Mad World of William M. Gaines by Frank Jacobs (that needs to be back in print) and this looks like a great companion to that.

Now if only someone would write a book about Don Martin…

[Artwork: Cover to Al Jaffee’s MAD Life.]