Mort Drucker

Morris "Mort" Drucker (22 March 1929 - 9 April 2020) was an American caricaturist. He was a contributor to MAD magazine for fifty years until his retirement in 2012. He caricatured movie and television celebrities and did poster work for movies, and he also co-created the Comic Strip Benchley with Jerry Dumas. He was hired as Special Character Designer for the 1995 Looney Tunes short "Another Froggy Evening".
== Biography ==
Mort Drucker was born in Brooklyn, New York, the son of Sarah and Edward Drucker, descended from a Jewish family. He attended the Erasmus Hall High School, where he met Barbera Hellerman, his future wife. After he graduated, they moved from Long Island to Syosset, and raised two daughters, Laurie And Melanie. His brief stint in formal art was in Parsons School of Design. He was hired by Bert Whitman to assist in his comic strip Debbie Dean at eighteen. Comic book legend Will Eisner recommended his work. 
Drucker went freelancing to other comic book Publisher like DC, Atlas Comics, and Dell Publishing. Even at this early phase of his career, Drucker's facility was such that he could effortlessly switch between his humorous style and his “dramatic narrative” style.
After a long year of freelancing, Drucker has a pleasant visit to MAD magazine in October 1956 in looking for his next job. Shortly after Al Feldstein became their second and longtime editor, Bill Gaines, the founder and publisher of MAD, and the gang of idiots were listening to the Dodgers game on the radio. Bill told Mort, "If the Dodgers win, we'll give you an assignment." The Dodgers won, and soon Bill gave Drucker his assignment. His first work for MAD was "MAD's TV Awards to Rolly Cigarettes Ad" in MAD #32 April 1957.
Although Mort Drucker kept working for MAD, he was still freelancing with DC Comics for comic books featuring Bob Hope and Jerry Lewis. His high-profile work on Mad led to other assignments, including, in 1962, illustrating The JFK Coloring Book, which sold 2.5 million copies. Twenty years after that assignment, Drucker returned to world of coloring books to illustrate volumes that depicted Oliver North and Ronald Reagan. One of his most famous assignments was not in comics at all; Drucker illustrated the movie poster for George Lucas's American Graffiti and also showed his flair for caricature in the poster for The Gang That Couldn't Shoot Straight. He also illustrated a number of humorous album covers that included The LBJ Menagerie and The New First Family 1968. The heavy-metal band Anthrax also commissioned him to draw caricatures of the entire group on the back cover for their State of Euphoria album. His Mad strips have been reprinted countless times in an endless stream of paperbacks, but he also found work illustrating books by other writers, and even some children's books. However, whatever he was doing, satirical caricatures had become his stock-in-trade. It became a status symbol among movie stars and other celebrities to be caricatured by Drucker.
Despite the plethora of assignments he got from different industries, Drucker did not neglect the arena of syndicated comic strips either, drawing the daily strip Benchley in collaboration with Jerry Dumas and John Reiner. Benchley chronicled the adventures of a totally fictional assistant to Ronald Reagan. Benchley was syndicated by the Register and Tribune Syndicate, and ran from 1984 through 1987.
In the advertising field, Drucker was equally busy, creating a design for the Supercup for Target in 1990, and then a year later Drucker, working with the United Fruit and Fresh Vegetable Association exec Mitchell Erick, created the Frugies, whose characters included Lord Mushroom, Pepe L'Pepper, Penelope Pear, and Adam Apple. He also created ads for The Shrunken Head Apple Sculpture Kit that ran in many comic books.
Everyone, it seemed, loved Mort Drucker’s work, from Mad fans of all ages to colleagues like Peanuts creator Charles Schulz, who commented in the forward to Familiar Faces: The Art of Mort Drucker, "Somehow, Mort Drucker can take the risky medium of caricature and draw people so that they are funny, instantly recognizable, but never offensive. Frankly, I don’t know how he does it, and I stand in a long list of admirers… Someone has said that Mort draws wonderful hands. I think he does wonderful shoes. I think he draws everything the way we would all like to draw." Mad co-editor Nick Meglin, who had been the first to review his samples back in 1956, praised Drucker as, "Number one in a field of one."
Among the many awards and accolades Drucker accumulated during his long career was having his Time magazine covers collected into the National Portrait Gallery, and winning numerous Special Features Awards from the National Cartoonists Society in 1985 through 1988. He also won the NCS Reuben Award in 1987. In 1988, Drucker was voted The Outstanding Cartoonist of the Year by his peers in the NCS, and was given a Lifetime Achievement Award in 2014. He was inducted into the Will Eisner Hall of Fame in 2010, and the NCS Hall of Fame in 2017. The Art Institute of Boston bestowed an Honorary Doctor of Fine Arts degree on Drucker. Fellow Mad artist Tom Richmond said of Drucker that, "Mort was a true master of the craft of visual storytelling, and his work transcended the boundaries of the different applications of the comic medium. He could do it all, from realistic comic-book work to the silliest of cartoons, and everything in between."
Drucker caricatured of Siskel and Ebert in "Another Froggy Evening".
Drucker died at the age of 91 in Long Beach. Many cartoonists and celebrities praised his memory. He's survived by his wife and his children.
== Looney Productions ==
* "Another Froggy Evening" (1995) (as Special Character Designer)
 
Category:Character Designers
Category:Real People
Category:1929 Births
Category:Deceased
Category:2020 Deaths