After viewing this collection of Jaffee’s fold-ins in Mad Magazine, I think he definitely helped mold my earliest political thinking. I remember the harsh ones shown here from the Vietnam war years. From month to month you never knew if you’d get a silly celebrity joke or hard political commentary, until you actually folded the page, or had fun trying to join the left and right panels in your head. The New York Times has an interactive web version of a bunch of Jaffee’s illustrations which mimics nicely the paper folding reveal of the punch-line (drag with your mouse).

Fold-Ins, Past and Present - Al Jaffee’s fold-ins for Mad magazine, from the 1960s to the present, in interactive form.

A Veteran Mad Man Remains in the Fold

Mad Fold This Book

Holy Cross Cemetery, Yeadon, PA, just outside of Philadelphia, in the Italian section. It’s a photograph glazed onto ceramics. The dates are in the 1920’s, close to a century in the weather and they are still sharp and unfaded. I haven’t been able to find any definitive information on the photo- transfer technique used back then, one possibility is silk screen. Not all information is on the first couple of pages of a Google search. But  FORGOTTEN FACES: A WINDOW INTO OUR IMMIGRANT PAST has this: “an artisan fashioned a photograph from gold, platinum and iridium alloys and fired it onto an enamel surface. A portrait made in this way can survive in a cemetery for well over 100 years.”  Today it can be done with a laser printer.

Something is eating into this one, but note that the rest of the image is still unfaded.

This one is heartbreaking.

The Freeway Blogger, is a one-man truth army, putting his bold, often funny anti-war/torture/bush statements on freeway overpasses out west. I’ve often featured the Freewayblogger here on the blog.

The Video is by Robert Corsini. After the overblown intro, it’s interesting to see the blogger behind the madness. He walks the no-man’s-land between the malls and the freeway in his orange vest of authority doing what needs to be done.