Mort Drucker

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Mort Drucker bigraphy, stories - Comic artist

Mort Drucker : biography

March 22, 1929 –

Mort Drucker (b. March 22, 1929) is an American caricaturist and comics artist best known as a contributor for over five decades in Mad, where he specialized in satires on the leading feature films and television series. Some sources list his birth date as March 22nd and others as March 29.http://www.tomrichmond.com/blog/2009/03/29/happy-80th-birthday-mort-drucker/

In a 1985 Tonight Show appearance, when Johnny Carson asked Michael J. Fox "When did you really know you’d made it in show business?", Fox replied, "When Mort Drucker drew my head."MAD’s Greatest Artists: Mort Drucker, 2012, Running Press, pg. 7

Early life

Born in Brooklyn, New York City, Drucker attended Brooklyn’s Erasmus Hall High School. There he met his future wife Barbara, whom he married shortly after her graduation. The couple moved to Long Island, living in Woodbury, where they brought up two daughters, Laurie and Melanie; their family eventually expanded with three grandchildren."Man Behind the Drawing Board", The Adventures of Bob Hope 87, 1963.

Career

Drucker entered the comics field by assisting Bert Whitman on Debbie Dean in 1947 when he was 18, based on a recommendation from Will Eisner. He moved on to do a syndicated newspaper gag panel, The Mountain Boys. He then joined the staff of National Periodical Publications (DC Comics), where he worked as a retoucher. Early in the 1950s, Drucker began doing freelance work.

Mad

In the fall of 1956, shortly after the departure of Mad’s founding editor Harvey Kurtzman, Drucker found his way to Mad. His first visit to the magazine’s offices coincided with a World Series broadcast, and publisher Bill Gaines told Drucker that if the Brooklyn Dodgers won the game, he would be hired. The Dodgers did win. Capricious though Drucker’s alleged audition process may have been, it made for a good anecdote. Years later, Gaines unsurprisingly confessed, "We would have hired him anyway." More than a half century later, Drucker held the longest uninterrupted tenure of any Mad artist.

Drucker had arrived at the Mad offices with drawings of the Lone Ranger and Hopalong Cassidy; while unlike the continuities he would become best known for, the Mad staff reacted favorably. The first to review Drucker’s portfolio was Mad associate editor Nick Meglin, who admitted, "I didn’t spot how great he was at caricatures. Not at first. But then, he wasn’t that great then." Drucker himself says that he "just wanted to be an artist… to get paid for drawing anything," and only started focusing on caricature work because he started getting more and more of those assignments. "That’s when I realized I’d found my calling," said Drucker.Evanier, Mark, MAD Art, Watson-Guptill Publications, 2002 At the time of Drucker’s arrival, Mad did not regularly feature TV and movie satires; editor Al Feldstein credited Drucker’s style and ability for the decision to start featuring them in every issue.

Meglin called Drucker "number one in a field of one." Charles Schulz wrote, "Frankly, I don’t know how he does it, and I stand in a long list of admirers… I think he draws everything the way we would all like to draw." In 2012, the Comics Reporter’s Tom Spurgeon wrote, "The way he draws James Caan’s eyebrow in [a parody of "The Godfather"] is worth some folks’ entire careers."http://www.comicsreporter.com/index.php/bundled_tossed_untied_and_stacked052212/

In 2012, Drucker discussed his art style, and how he applied it to his Mad assignments:

"I’ve always considered a caricature to be the complete person, not just a likeness. Hands in particular have always been a prime focus for me as they can be as expressive of character as the exaggerations and distortions a caricaturist searches for. I try to capture the essence of the person, not just facial features… I’ve discovered through years of working at capturing a humorous likeness that it’s not about the features themselves as much as the space between the features. We all have two eyes, a nose, a mouth, hair and jaw lines, but yet we all look different. What makes that so is the space between them.