I have shown many samples of Al Jaffee's Tall Tales, bit in color and from online sources in black and white. And when I am done I may have all of the delicious Sundays in my various posts. But I haven't even scratached the surface as far as the five years of daily gags that Mr. Jaffee did inbetween. Included this time is an interview about the strip from it's later period.
6 comments:
And we, who know the Al Jaffee's artworks from MAD magazine...
That news article is interesting...I wonder what the magazine venture was that caused him to lose $20,000? That's a fortune even today!
That was Humbug, which lost both him and Arnold Roth money if I understand correctly. My next book project with Craig Yoe (soon to be announced) will contain some unknown Jaffee material as well from that same period.
I used to clip Tall Tales back in the late fifties...and still have them. I moved and could no longer get them. The Fantagraphics was a nice book, but a disappointment for us completists of this work of a master of seven plus decades! We need a complete collection!
Hold on to it, because it may be a unique collection. I think the main thing holding up a more complete book is the unavailabillity of collected runs.
Still chagrined that I let a paperback collection of this strip go away during a series of moves between 1977 and 1980. It was brutal. I guess I could look into the reprint that's coming out (or has come out) now.
The one with the blueprint and the fly swatted on it turned up as a Don Martin (two-pager?) in MAD, maybe in the late 70s. I didn't notice if there was a writing credit. At the time, I believe I was assuming that Martin wrote his own gags, and I think the magazine lent credence to the theory by not listing writers on Martin pages. (I also assumed that George Price and other New Yorker cartoonists wrote their own—that's how long ago it was.)
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