Posted By Dan Greenfield on Mar 22, 2024 | 4 comments

A BIRTHDAY TRIBUTE to the late, great Mad artist…

By CHRIS RYALL

Mort Drucker — born 95 years ago on March 22, 1929 — was one of the greatest Mad artists to ever work on the magazine. His movie parodies are legend, not only for Mort’s unparalleled mastery over celebrity likenesses but also the sheer number of visual gags he packed into those parodies, too. The many great film/tv parodists that followed – from Angelo Torres to Cracked’s John Severin to Tom Richmond and far beyond — all follow in the path first, or at least best, walked by Drucker.

Mort was Mad, one of the primary reasons the magazine stood apart from other humor publications.

And yet, for the most part, this celebration of Mort’s work is not going to focus on those parodies (with one exception pulled from my all-time favorite Mort adaptation). Instead, the 13+ illustrations  present an even more broad array of celebrity images, collages, movie posters, magazine ads, and other such pieces that not only show Mort’s mastery at capturing likenesses but also demonstrate how long he was at the top of his game – theses span four decades.

Before we get to the actual 13 I chose for today, a couple bonus images Mort produced for a couple 1980s hard-rock bands, Anthrax and Motley Crue. The former, I remember seeing in the CD’s liner notes back in the day and being impressed that Anthrax (notably guitarist/comic nerd Scott Ian) recognized Mort’s talent; the latter, I only saw for the first time this year.

Here are 13 flights of fancy into THE CELEBRITY WORLD OF MORT DRUCKER:

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1. Marvel Tales 146, 1956, Marvel: But first, I wanted to lead with a page that showed that Mort’s talent extended far beyond the parodies for which he was most well known. While his faces on this page, from 1956’s Marvel Tales #146, show some cartoony expressiveness, his background work, notably in panel four, grounds the scene in a more realistic way than his Mad work that followed.

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2. Mad #94, TV Stars, 1965:

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3. 1969 Whirlpool Ad:

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4. American Graffiti movie poster, 1973:

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5. 1980s Film Stars:

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6. Politicians Across the Decades, 1983:

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7. Assorted Marlon Brandos and Paul Newmans, 1985:

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8. “The National Association of Late Late Movie Stars,” 1986:

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9. The HBO Class of 1989:

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10. Mad Magazine’s William M. Gaines, Nick Meglin and John Ficarra, 1991:

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11. ESPN and ABC Sports Ad, 1999:

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12. Assorted Celebrities, 2003:

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13. William M. Gaines and Other Mad Magazine Founders and Luminaries, Vanity Fair, 2008.

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What’s that, you say? We already did the requisite 13 images? Yes, true… but I did promise one image from my favorite Mad parody so here’s a little bonus. This is the first page of a pretty perfect parody of the Batman 1966 TV show. Lou Silverstone’s script is wonderful and funny and just biting in all the right ways, and it’s matched/exceeded by Mort’s brilliant work on every panel of every page.

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(NOTE from Dan: Chris is constitutionally incapable of editing himself down to 13 of anything. It’s what makes him so charming and he’s the only one of our Usual Gang I let get away with it. So here are two more pieces, from Mad About the Movies and Mad Follies 2 (the latter colored by none other than Frank Frazetta!)

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MORE

— 13 MAD COVERS: A MORT DRUCKER Salute. Click here.

— 13 SNAPPY COVERS: A Mad AL JAFFEE Birthday Celebration. Click here.

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Chris Ryall is the co-owner/publisher of Image Comics imprint Syzygy Publishing. His latest series is Tales of Syzpense, out now. Subscribe to his Substack of the same name!