New York City - Al Jaffee, a man who could lay claim to being the world’s oldest adolescent and who just now is enjoying a fresh burst of public and professional recognition. The idea was to look in on him as he created the latest installment of a feature he has been drawing for Mad magazine since, incredibly, 1964. The Mad Fold-In, which embeds a hidden joke within a seemingly straightforward illustration, it should come as no surprise that the simple article ended up being not so simple after all.

If you were young at any time in the last 44 years, you know the fold-in: the feature on the inside of Mad’s back cover that poses a question whose answer is found by folding the page in thirds. September 1978: “What colorful fantastic creature is still being exploited even after it has wiggled and died?” A picture of a garish butterfly, folded, becomes an equally garish Elvis.

The fold-ins these days are as full of youth culture as ever. (March 2008: “What major star has recently admitted receiving illegal career-damaging human growth injections?” And a picture that looks as if it’s going to be Roger Clemens folds to become Jamie Lynn Spears, pregnant.) So the first thing that strikes you when Mr. Jaffee greets you at the door of his studio on the East Side of Manhattan is his age. This man, still credibly negotiating the milieu of teenagers, is 87.

“I work for a magazine that’s essentially for young people, and to have them keep me going, I feel very lucky,” Mr. Jaffee said. “To use an old cliché, I’m like an old racehorse. When the other horses are running, I want to run too.”

Mad is, incongruously, a publication that seems to cultivate longevity, as evident from artists like Mort Drucker (first appearance, 1957) and Sergio Aragonés (1963). No current contributor, though, goes back further than Mr. Jaffee. And while other Mad features, like Spy vs. Spy, have changed artists over the years, only Mr. Jaffee has drawn the fold-in. Since the first appeared in April 1964 all but a handful of specialty issues of the magazine have had one.

“A number of months ago I counted, and I came up with something like 396,” Mr. Jaffee said. “I must have done No. 400 by now.”

He started work on No. 4 whatever, for the issue that goes on sale in mid-May, as he has all the others: with a rough pencil sketch. This one shows an altar scene invoking the “Raiders of the Lost Ark” movies. “Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull” is due out soon, and the fold-in question is, “What frightening ancient relic will be the focus of much attention and fanfare this summer?” The folded-in answer, of course, has nothing to do with Indiana Jones.

Mr. Jaffee seemed completely absorbed by the task at hand, explaining how he would do a fuller sketch, then ultimately render the scene in watercolor and gouache, with the entire process usually taking 10 days or so. But — and here is where the simple feature turned not so simpleAnd so in early March there was Mr. Jaffee, leaning in to put a mustache on a piece of statuary in that altar sketch. It is, these days, a two-handed job: he has a condition called essential tremor, which makes his drawing hand, the right, shake.

His editors at Mad — men who perhaps got their first paper cuts doing Jaffee fold-ins as boys — might disagree. “When he brings in fold-ins now, a lot of times, it’s, ‘Geez, this guy’s painting better than ever,’ ” said John Ficarra, Mad’s editor.

And Sam Viviano, the art director, seems in awe of Mr. Jaffee’s old-school technique. “I think part of the brilliance of the fold-in is lost on younger generations who are so used to Photoshop and being able to do stuff like that on the computer,” he said. “It’s matching the colors and keeping the sense of what exists at two levels, the original image and the folded-in image. We’ve never actually known anyone else who could do that.”

Mr. Jaffee does have a computer, but its main benefit, he said, has been to make the typographic tricks in the fold-in easier to create. He doesn’t draw with it, which leads to another surprise: the master of the fold-in never actually folds.

“I’m working on a hard, flat board,” he said. “I cannot fold it. That’s why my planning has to be so correct.”  “The computer would make it so much simpler,” he added. “But I think I’m going to remain a dinosaur.”

Even Mr. Jaffee’s less-known work is getting a new appreciation. In August Fantagraphics will bring out a hardcover collection of all 11 issues of Humbug, a magazine that Harvey Kurtzman, Mad’s founding editor, published in 1957 and ’58 with some now-venerable cartoonists, including Mr. Jaffee. In July Abrams Image is publishing the best of Tall Tales, a vertical comic strip Mr. Jaffee drew daily from 1957 to 1963. And a few weeks ago,  Mr. Jaffee learned that he is one of three nominees for the prestigious Reuben Award for cartoonist of the year, to be presented by the National Cartoonists Society in May in New Orleans.

“I can’t imagine a fold-in done by anyone else but Al,” Mr. Viviano said. “But the fold-in is such a part of Mad that it’s hard to imagine Mad without it.”

By . . Neil Genzlinger