Today DC Entertainment and MAD Magazine announced the planned release of a new MAD Magazine iPad app complete with interactive features and exclusive content. The app is scheduled to be released on April Fool’s Day (Alfred E. Neuman’s birthday, no less), and will be free to download through the iTunes App Store. The MAD app will include a mixture of free and paid content, including a free preview of the magazine.

Seems quite affordable too: Free app; current issues: $4.99; back issues $1.99; $9.99 annual subscription; free subscription if you’re already a print subscriber.

From the New York Times:

Al Ross, whose droll cartoons featuring married couples, bar habitués, anthropomorphic animals, philosophizing prisoners, art and publishing world denizens, anachronistic mythological figures and loyal Mets fans appeared in The New Yorker for more than 60 years, died on Thursday in the Bronx. He was 100.

When celebrities ask for original MAD Mag art from Tom Richmond he provides an oversized print of the art as published in the magazine and requests they autograph their name next to their caricature.

He’s built up an impressive collection which he terms his Wall of Shame.

AVC: What artists were important to you growing up?

JD: Growing up, of course, Walt Disney. Donald Duck—the big feet—and Snow White And The Seven Dwarfs. And Harold Foster, who drew Prince Valiant, and he also drew Tarzan, Edgar Rice Burroughs’ bit. And Alex Raymond, who drew Flash Gordon and drew Secret Agent X-9 and Jungle Jim all at the same time. How he did that, I don’t know. I used to get, when I was small, about 12 years old, the Sunday paper. And the page was full of nothing but artwork. George McManus was on the front page, Maggie and Jiggs [of Bringing Up Father]. Beautiful stuff. Very tight, very funny, very illustrated. And then you’d turn the page, and there would be Alex Raymond, the top would be Jungle Jim, and then it would be Flash Gordon. And the third page, again, was Harold Foster, with all of the knights and everything. When I was, I guess, about 12 or 15 years old, I wrote Harold Foster a fan letter—they knocked me out, his Sunday pages—and he sent me a Sunday page of Prince Valiant making a saddle for a horse, and the bridle. From that day on, the horses that I drew, the cowboys and stuff like that, had to come from Harold Foster. And also a big impression was Fred Harman, who drew Red Ryder. He drew great guns and holsters that really had a hard grip on it. So, that’s about it

Today Jaffee, who will be 91 in March, is known for his own contraptions, many designed during his long relationship with Mad magazine. There’s the Mad Fold-in, the magazine’s inside back page, which cleverly turns one Jaffee work into another by folding one portion over another. There’s “Snappy Answers to Stupid Questions,” in which a humdrum question leads to several unexpected sarcasms.

And then there are his sketches of “Mad inventions,” including an airbag suit and an improved beverage can. Some of them, like a smokeless ashtray or a multiroll toilet paper dispenser, have come to pass — much to Jaffee’s amusement. He’s been a primary contributor to Mad for more than 50 years, one of the chief purveyors of the humor that has shaped everything from “Airplane!” to The Onion to “The Daily Show with Jon Stewart.” (Mad is a unit of DC Comics, which — like CNN — is a part of Time Warner.)

Amazing career.

Check out all 16.

They’re among the cartoonists who put MAD on the map in the 1950s. Over the next six decades, they blended celebrity caricature, pop-culture parody and political satire in a way that would influence American comedy from Saturday Night Live to The Onion and more. And some of them are still churning out gags for MAD, in defiance of the ever-expanding generation gap with the magazine’s young audience.

This certainly would have ranked high as far as events to go to.

Mankoff is describing the behind-the-scenes process of culling and curating The New Yorker’s annual Cartoon Issue (now on newstands and online). The issue offers not only an A-list collection of “funnies,” but also featured cartoons by such top talent as Barry Blitt, Roz Chast, Emily Flake, Zachary Kanin, Marc Rosenthal and Mark Alan Stamaty.