how the fold in came to be an every issue feature is kinda a fun story:<p>From his 95th birthday article (gothamist). It has a nice video too:<p><a href="https://gothamist.com/arts-entertainment/hanging-with-al-jaffee-mad-magazines-95-year-old-journeyman-cartoonist" rel="nofollow">https://gothamist.com/arts-entertainment/hanging-with-al-jaf...</a><p>"One morning I woke up and I spread out all the magazines I was subscribing to which included Playboy, and National Geographic and a couple of others. When I opened them up, the things that popped out was the first one, Playboy, was the fold-out; and then National Geographic had something that showed the new stadium being built by some athletic team. Then there was another one with a fold-out. Of course, the way we work is something triggers a thought, and what triggered in me was if all of them are doing expensive, full color fold-outs, why doesn't MAD Magazine do a cheap fold-in? MAD was black and white at that time.<p>I thought about it for a moment, and then I looked in the newspaper and there was a story about Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton and Eddie Fischer and accusations that Elizabeth Taylor was going from one guy to another. I thought, "Well, that might make a fold-in. I did something very simple, which was to put Elizabeth Taylor on the left side, and Richard Burton was somewhere in the middle, but on the right side, there was just some young guy. The question was something like, "Who's going to be Elizabeth Taylor's next?" We thought it would be Richard Burton, but if you folded it in, it was just that guy on the right side, and it says, "some guy in the crowd." That was the gag. I took it into the editor, Al Feldstein. I said, "Al, I've got an idea that strikes me funny, but you're going to reject it because if you printed it, it would mutilate a page in the magazine." He looks at it. He says, "I like this." He immediately jumped up and ran into Bill Gaines, and then came back to me and said, "Bill said, 'Lets do it. If the kid folds the page, and he feels he's ruined the magazine, he'll buy another magazine for his collection.'" Ever the money man.<p>I did it, and that was it. It was a one shot gag. A couple of weeks later, Feldstein rushes up to me—I happened to be up at MAD at that time—and said, "Where's the next fold-in?" I said, "Al, there is no next fold-in. That's it. It was a one time gag." He says, "I want another fold-in."
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