Tuesday, 15 March 2016

Train Jam: Strangers on a Train, Creating Video Games



He’s drawn absurd animal comics, invented innumerable impossible items, and been responsible for mutilating the back covers of many millions of magazines. He’s won the highest honors that the medium of comics has to offer, authored best-selling books, and appeared in more issues of Mad Magazine than any other contributor. He’s Al Jaffee, one of America’s best-known and most beloved cartoonists, and this past weekend marked his 95th birthday.
On March 13th, 1921, Abraham (Al) Jaffee was born in Savannah, Georgia to Mildred and Morris Jaffee, a pair of LIthuanian immigrants. Al demonstrated a love of art from an early age: Mary-Lou Wiesman’s 2010 biography, Al Jaffee’s Mad Life, describes how he and his three brothers would spend Sundays gathered around the comic section, watching his father use a fountain pen to carefully copy their favorite images. In 1927, after his mother moved the siblings back to Lithuania, Morris remained in Georgia, where he saved up funny papers and sent them as international care packages. Using these comics as reference material, young Al taught himself to draw his favorite characters, sometimes on paper, but often simply in the dirt with a stick.
The rest of Al Jaffee’s childhood could be conservatively described as tumultuous. After a year in Lithuania, Morris brought his family back to America. A year later, Al and his brothers moved with their mother back to Lithuania again, where the remained for the next four years. In 1933, Al’s father once again arrived to reunite with his family, but this time, his mother refused to return to America. So at age 12, Al and his two closest siblings crossed the ocean to New York, where they would be separated and live with different relatives, while his mother and youngest brother remained with the rest of their family overseas.


Read More: Mad Man: Celebrating Al Jaffee on his 95th Birthday! | http://comicsalliance.com/tribute-al-jaffee/?trackback=tsmclip


Disheveled, eyes bruised with fatigue, and feeling grungy after two days of showerless toil, 190 video game designers, artists and programmers disembarked on Saturday afternoon from the rain-slicked California Zephyr at the Emeryville, Calif., Amtrak station.
The travelers — some of whom had come from as far away as Zambia and Pakistan — had taken part in Train Jam, which uses the trip from Chicago to this city just north of Oakland as both an opportunity and a time frame for strangers to come together and, amid laptops, headphones and virtual-reality headsets, create video games.
“You will never know true happiness until you’ve showered after a 52-hour-long train ride,” Adriel Wallick, the event’s organizer, wrote on Twitter after arriving in the Bay Area.
Ms. Wallick, 29, an independent game developer from the Netherlands, conceived Train Jam as a way of making a creative venture out of the journey to the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, the world’s largest annual gathering of game makers. Ms. Wallick said the idea came to her during a trip from Boston to Seattle three years ago: “I realized that a cross-country train ride would work perfectly as a game jam,” she said, referring to the increasingly prevalent events in which participants develop video games over an allotted time period.
He’s drawn absurd animal comics, invented innumerable impossible items, and been responsible for mutilating the back covers of many millions of magazines. He’s won the highest honors that the medium of comics has to offer, authored best-selling books, and appeared in more issues of Mad Magazine than any other contributor. He’s Al Jaffee, one of America’s best-known and most beloved cartoonists, and this past weekend marked his 95th birthday.
On March 13th, 1921, Abraham (Al) Jaffee was born in Savannah, Georgia to Mildred and Morris Jaffee, a pair of LIthuanian immigrants. Al demonstrated a love of art from an early age: Mary-Lou Wiesman’s 2010 biography, Al Jaffee’s Mad Life, describes how he and his three brothers would spend Sundays gathered around the comic section, watching his father use a fountain pen to carefully copy their favorite images. In 1927, after his mother moved the siblings back to Lithuania, Morris remained in Georgia, where he saved up funny papers and sent them as international care packages. Using these comics as reference material, young Al taught himself to draw his favorite characters, sometimes on paper, but often simply in the dirt with a stick.
The rest of Al Jaffee’s childhood could be conservatively described as tumultuous. After a year in Lithuania, Morris brought his family back to America. A year later, Al and his brothers moved with their mother back to Lithuania again, where the remained for the next four years. In 1933, Al’s father once again arrived to reunite with his family, but this time, his mother refused to return to America. So at age 12, Al and his two closest siblings crossed the ocean to New York, where they would be separated and live with different relatives, while his mother and youngest brother remained with the rest of their family overseas.


Read More: Mad Man: Celebrating Al Jaffee on his 95th Birthday! | http://comicsalliance.com/tribute-al-jaffee/?trackback=tsmclip
He’s drawn absurd animal comics, invented innumerable impossible items, and been responsible for mutilating the back covers of many millions of magazines. He’s won the highest honors that the medium of comics has to offer, authored best-selling books, and appeared in more issues of Mad Magazine than any other contributor. He’s Al Jaffee, one of America’s best-known and most beloved cartoonists, and this past weekend marked his 95th birthday.
On March 13th, 1921, Abraham (Al) Jaffee was born in Savannah, Georgia to Mildred and Morris Jaffee, a pair of LIthuanian immigrants. Al demonstrated a love of art from an early age: Mary-Lou Wiesman’s 2010 biography, Al Jaffee’s Mad Life, describes how he and his three brothers would spend Sundays gathered around the comic section, watching his father use a fountain pen to carefully copy their favorite images. In 1927, after his mother moved the siblings back to Lithuania, Morris remained in Georgia, where he saved up funny papers and sent them as international care packages. Using these comics as reference material, young Al taught himself to draw his favorite characters, sometimes on paper, but often simply in the dirt with a stick.
The rest of Al Jaffee’s childhood could be conservatively described as tumultuous. After a year in Lithuania, Morris brought his family back to America. A year later, Al and his brothers moved with their mother back to Lithuania again, where the remained for the next four years. In 1933, Al’s father once again arrived to reunite with his family, but this time, his mother refused to return to America. So at age 12, Al and his two closest siblings crossed the ocean to New York, where they would be separated and live with different relatives, while his mother and youngest brother remained with the rest of their family overseas.


Read More: Mad Man: Celebrating Al Jaffee on his 95th Birthday! | http://comicsalliance.com/tribute-al-jaffee/?trackback=tsmclip

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