The Most Fun You'll Have All Week?

For those who grew up reading MAD magazine, you surely remember the Fold-Ins on the inside back cover, created by the brilliant Al Jaffee. Jaffee is still drawing those clever visual compositions today, and he got some much-deserved love in the Sunday New York Times this week.


Even better than the feature on Jaffee is the interactive feature the NYT included with the online edition of the article. With a click and drag of your mouse, you can play with a bunch of Fold-Ins from past issues of MAD. Many of the jokes are dated and surprisingly preachy (yet probably much more daring than you see in MAD these days), but the visual trickery and ingenuity still holds up.

I'm sure lots of people have horror stories of mothers throwing out their baseball card or comic book collections. For me, the bad memories center on my old collection of MAD magazines. Mama Cass tossed those out when we moved before I started sixth grade. How I didn't realize what she was up to is something that boggles my mind to this day. (Maybe she knew that I wasn't paying as much attention to those magazines as I once had. It took me a while to discover that I didn't have them anymore.) Thanks to library book sales and appreciations like this NYT feature, however, I get to experience a little bit of nostalgia.

(via The Beat)