Al Jaffee - Career

Career

Jaffee began his career in 1941, working as a comic-book artist for several publications, including Timely Comics and Atlas Comics, the 1940s and 1950s precursors, respectively, of Marvel Comics. While working alongside future Mad cartoonist Dave Berg, Jaffee created several humor features for Timely, including "Inferior Man" and "Ziggy Pig and Silly Seal". For approximately a year and a half in the late 1940s, Jaffee was editing Timely's humor and teenage comics, including the "Patsy Walker" line.

Jaffee recalled in a 2004 interview,

I created Ziggy Pig and Silly Seal from scratch. Stan said to me, "Create an animated-type character. Something different, something new." I searched around and thought, "I’ve never seen anyone do anything about a seal," so I made him the lead character. So I created "Silly Seal". One day, Stan said to me, "Why don’t you give him a little friend of some sort?" I had already created Ziggy Pig, who had his own little feature, so it was quite easy to combine them into one series. I said, "How about Ziggy Pig?" Stan said, "Okay!" I should add that, while I created Ziggy Pig, it was Stan who named him.

From 1957-1963, Jaffee drew the elongated Tall Tales panel for the New York Herald Tribune, which was syndicated to over 100 newspapers. Jaffee credited its middling success with a pantomime format that was easy to sell abroad, but his higher-ups were unsatisfied with the strip's status: "The head of the syndicate, who was a certifiable idiot, said the reason it was not selling is we gotta put words in it. So they made me put words in it. Immediately lost 28 foreign papers." A collection of Jaffee's Tall Tales strips was published in 2008. Jaffee also scripted the short-lived strips Debbie Deere and Jason in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Since 1984, Jaffee has provided illustrations for "The Shpy," a lighthearted Jewish-themed adventure feature in Tzivos Hashem's bimonthly children's publication The Moshiach Times.