Mort Drucker
El Mestre
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For the - quote - 500th CooperToons Caricature - unquote - what could be better than than to have a tribute to the greatest of them all, El Mestre de la Caricatura1, Mort Drucker?
Footnote
Although most people might use the Italian word maestro as the honorific address to a master of an art, we'll give equal time to the Catalonians.
Every student of art knows Mort Drucker. From the late 1950's until past the Millennium, if you saw Mad Magazine you saw Mort.
Born in 1929, Mort never went to art school and was completely self-taught. But one of his teachers saw a drawing by the seven year old and sent a note to his parents that they should encourage his skills. Like many other comic artists, Mort began as an assistant, and in his case he was hired as a retouch artist. He then began working free lance for DC Comics, and in 1956, he connected with Mad Magazine. He was also fortunate that he showed up in the offices with a bunch of drawings at a time when Mad needed new artists. Mort was one of 300 individuals who applied2 and one of the two who were hired.
Footnote
Being "hired" as one of Mad's writers or artists for Mad - the "usual gang of idiots" - requires some qualification. All artists and writers were freelance, and so they also worked for other publications and clients. Dick DeBartolo, in addition to penning many storylines for Mad, also wrote for a number of television game shows including To Tell the Truth when Gary Moore was the host. When one of the challengers was a police sketch artist, he drew a portrait of Dick based only on a verbal description. The celebrity panel was shown the drawing and were easily able to select Dick from a lineup.
The editors of Mad didn't realize Mort would be a master caricaturist until 1959, three years after his first submission. That July he drew his first big TV satire, "The Night That Perry Masonmint Lost a Case" which poked fun at the TV show Perry Mason starring Raymond Burr. The parody was such a hit that from 1960 on virtually every issue had a Mort Drucker satire3.
Footnote
One departure from Mort's providing the artwork for a TV satire was when Don Martin ("Mad's Maddest Artist") illustrated "Genteel Ben", a parody based on the surprisingly popular show Gentle Ben about a full grown black bear who befriends an eight year old boy. Don didn't attempt at drawing caricatures but kept to his usual heavy jawed, hinged-footed characters.
The response in the next issue's Letters to the Editor were vehemently negative. The readers called to return all such art assignments to Mort (Mort had, though, illustrated another article in the same issue).
How much the brouhaha contributed to Don's departure from the magazine isn't known - there were certainly other reasons - but Don later left Mad and joined the artists illustrating Cracked - the only satire magazine that ever really competed with Mad.
Mort didn't restrict his work to the TV and movie satires. He also provided cover art (front and back) on a number of occasions. By one count, his total contributions to the magazine were well over 400.
Mort's style changed over the years - which isn't unusual for artists - and his early caricatures had relatively little exaggeration and might be termed cartoon portraits. Later the renderings became more elastic with a tendency of certain subjects to have what can be honestly called the "Drucker chin". But Mort's drawings were never so distorted that you couldn't tell who was who and he was always careful that the art never detracted from the story line.
A facet of Mort's art that's well appreciated by artistic cognoscenti but not necessarily by the layman was that he was also a master at drawing hands. One caricature teacher pointed out that when you draw hands they should be done with the same care as rendering the likeness, and that's clearly Mort's opus drawingandi. When Mort drew multiple characters in a single panel - not an easy task - the parade of hands would be a major contribution to the artistry.
Some of Mort's satires were on a double level. The classic "East Side Story", written by Frank Jacobs, was both a spoof of the Leonard Bernstein's West Side Story and the rivalry of the West and East political divisions in the world. Here the "gangs", rather than being New York "delinquents", were composed of politicians from the various countries of the Kennedy/Khrushchev years. In this case - and which was unusual for Mort's articles - he did not draw the background but instead it was crafted from photographs of the United Nations building.
Another double satire was "Keep on Trekin'" which parodied both the Star Trek franchise and Broadway musicals which were enjoying a resurgence. What even the casual reader will see is that the caricature of Captain Kirk was not up the usual standards. But as all portraitists know, some subjects are amendable to a likeness while others are a challenge. Caricatures can be particularly confounding since you have to both exaggerate and get a likeness. That even Mort had trouble getting Captain Kirk down is not a criticism. One of the best caricaturists today has pointed out that the young William Shatner was a notoriously difficult subject for the caricaturist4.
Starting in 2018 and except for one issue a year, Mad began publishing only re-runs of earlier articles, thus effectively ending Mad's long tenure in American Culture. But for many the writing had been on the wall as early as 2001 when Mad decided that to stay afloat, they had to accept advertisement5.
Accepting real ads was a major singularity for the publication because much of Mad's humor had been directed at Madison Avenue. True, there had been difficulty with the parodies after photographs began replacing artwork since it was difficult finding models who would or could put on the crazy expressions needed for the spoofs. In the end it was simply easier to use the Mad staff and contributors - such as assistant editor Jerry DeFuccio, art director Lenny Brenner, artist and writer Sergio Aragones, and at times even the publisher himself, William Gaines.
References
"Mad about Mort: Caricaturist Mort Drucker of Mad Magazine Talks About His Technique", Mark Voger, NJ.com, Dec 28, 2012 .
"Mort Drucker, Master of the Mad Caricature", The New York Times, April 9, 2020.
"Mort Drucker", Doug Gilford, Mad Cover Site.
The Mad Art of Caricature, Tom Richmond, Deadline Demon Publishing, 2011.
"Keep On Trekin': The 'Star Trek' Musical", Mad Magazine, Dee Caruso (Writer), Bill Levine (Writer), Mort Drucker (Artist), July, 1969.
"East Side Story", Mad Magazine, Frank Jacobs, Mort Drucker (Artist), April, 1963.
"Dick DeBartolo", Internet Movie Data Base.
"A Gallery of Mad Magazine’s Rollicking Fake Advertisements from the 1960s", Open Culture, February, 2015.
"Not Funny: Mad’s Long, Steady Circ Decline", Dylan Stableford, Folio, January 27, 2009.
"Sunday Mailbag - Bland Faces?", Tom Richmond, Richmond Illustrations, August 14, 2016.