The second is by Mort Drucker:
The first joke is a wisecrack using generic cartoon characters. The second joke involves a different kind of visual humor. It uses sharp observations about the personalities of the father and son: contrast the thick, rough lines used for the father with the delicate lines of the meek son; note how the angle of the picture points us right to the boy's upturned face and frail shoulders. The father’s cigar in his immense paw is a prop strategically placed in the foreground. The father's "smile" is misshapen from years of chomping on those cigars.
We know nothing about the lives of the father or son in the Davis cartoon but it doesn't matter; the joke doesn't depend on it. On the other hand, Drucker’s drawing tells us everything about this boy's life and the life of his father.
The first cartoon could've been drawn by any of the artists in MAD's talented stable. The second cartoon could only have been drawn by Drucker.
MAD's evolution from the first type of joke to the second type of joke is the story of how art set MAD free.
MAD started as a ten cent comic book, containing mostly silly spoofs of other comics or movies. It had an excellent collection of artists such as Davis, Wally Wood and Will Elder but its content remained mostly slapstick. MAD couldn't graduate to a more challenging and relevant form of humor until it acquired a different kind of artistic talent– a talent capable of handling a wider range of facial expressions, psychological staging and body language, of cultural and political references.
This doesn't mean the early MAD art wasn't wonderful and hilarious. My point is that the new drawing ability gave MAD's writers a vehicle for more ambitious humor with far greater range.
MAD moved from Superduperman to questioning authority around the kitchen table...
Drucker’s version of West Side Story was not a satire of the movie, but rather a story about a street gang rumble between the communist eastern block nations and the democratic western nations. Drucker had to draw recognizable caricatures of dictators dressed as juvenile delinquents, dancing in front of photos of the United Nations. Earlier MAD artists couldn't do this.
The movie, Fiddler on the Roof was converted into Antenna on the Roof, a commentary about the culture shock of Jewish families who came to America and found "success" to be a mixed blessing. Earlier MAD artists could never support such a story.
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| Drucker: making the nutty drawings believable by alternating them with accurate ones. |
22 comments:
Drucker was awesome. Nobody like him.
My mom bought me a subscription to MAD in the 90s. She thought it was something special. I didn’t get it then, and I still don’t.
If it was ever meant as a rebellion, against something stiff and starched for Sunday church, something so solemn it invited a sneer, that world was already dying before I was born. I’ve never really known anyone who goes to church regularly. My kid’s generation can hardly manage a fork, let alone a necktie. The center of the cultural world I grew up in was Nirvana, Eminem, American Pie, Beavis and Butthead— that’s it. If they were critique and farce to older generations, to us they were just normative culture. (And you expect us to be shocked by Donald Trump calling a country a shit hole? Have you watched South Park?)
So what place could MAD or SNL play? What is irreverence when irreverence itself has become the norm?
Just one more dead-toothed gremlin laughing at how ugly the world can be made to appear. I don’t see the point. Give me beauty or don’t bother.
Richard-- I agree that MAD was something different for the 90s than for the 50s. The 1950s was a conformist culture with social / political straightjackets that finally burst in the 1960s. The 1990s was a more snarky and open culture, where MAD, once the great liberator, had lost its avant garde status because it couldn't keep up with the freedoms of the internet. Of course, that by itself doesn't affect the quality of the art.
Sam Viviano, the former Art Director of MAD, after listening to generation after generation complain that MAD's best days were behind it, concluded that every MAD reader believed that the "best" period for MAD was the period in their personal childhood when they first discovered and read it.
As for your grievance about irreverence becoming the norm, welcome to your place on the The Bhavachakra, the Buddhist Wheel of Life. (I think Peter Paul & Mary wrote a song about it.) In ancient Rome, the great orator Cicero was already decrying, "Times are bad: children no longer obey their parents and everyone is writing a book." But depending on your location on the wheel, the view looks very different. For our time, I'd urge you to consider instead the view of John Locke: "Men are so foolish, that they take care to avoid what mischiefs may be done them by pole-cats, or foxes; but are content, nay, think it safety, to be devoured by lions.”
The panel of Kruchev singing was in the first issue of Mad I ever bought on the stands--IIRC. If it wasn't that issue, then definitely one o the first few issues I bought.
> In ancient Rome, the great orator Cicero was already decrying, "Times are bad: children no longer obey their parents and everyone is writing a book."
To be fair to Cicero, he lived through the collapse of the Roman Republic, the total dissolution of the virtuous civitates, and was murdered by the Mark Antony’s forces shortly after the coup. But I hear ya.
That wedding buffet is a killer!
JSL
Do people realize that Dave's quote by John Locke is about Trump?
Zzz
When I was a little kid leafing through Mad I just looked at the pictures. Then I started reading it and looking at the pictures. Now I just look at the pictures.
I always found it strange that Drucker would win the cartooning award, year after year. I feel there’s simply too much observation in Drucker’s work for it to be cartooning per se. Martin, Prohias, and Jaffee each had a codified lexicon - a rack of pre-made symbols that they developed and deployed. But Drucker was always looking at humanity afresh. In my view, he was an artist-illustrator; more like Raymond or Flagg. He had more in common with Neal Adams than Don Martin.
Is there a book collection of Drucker’s work which doesn’t feature famous people / film & TV parodies ?
( i.e. Like the panels 2, 3 & 4 which I’m assuming were from one-off short stories within Mad ? )
...
It's actually a dig the Whigs, specifically a reference Admiral (later Lord) Alexander Farquahar Ramsey-Blair Colquhoun who was widely but incorrectly believed to have been earlier in his career onboard the Dolphin which was the nautical arena of an incidence of cannibalism in 1759. The allegation began as a satirical jest in illustrations by James Gilray but was taken as true by an ignorant public, or deliberately misbelieved in order to impugn their poltical alternatives in early Tory pamphlets.
(RBC was on Nelson's Dolphin, which was a navy vessel and a different ship.)
Laurence John-- Today is your lucky day. I'm just putting the finishing touches on a monograph about Drucker for Fantagraphics. In accordance with my agreement with MAD, only 1/3 of the images can be famous caricatures from MAD. The other 2/3 will be art from other projects and Drucker's personal collection. (I've leaked some of them here over the past year: https://illustrationart.blogspot.com/2023/10/one-lovely-drawing-part-70.html ; https://illustrationart.blogspot.com/2021/06/drawing-on-shopping-bag: .htmlhttps://illustrationart.blogspot.com/2024/12/mort-drucker-preliminary-sketches.html ; )
Looking very much forward to it!
- - -
Postmodern Anonymouse
I'm afraid. I'm afraid, Dave. Dave, my mind is going. I can feel it. I can feel it. Daisy, Daisy....
David, thanks I’ll be interested in seeing that. I was more broadly wondering whether he had done anything like a strip (or longer ‘graphic novel’) with recurring characters that he had created (not famous people like the Bob Hope strip) but I’m guessing not, from what I can see online.
"My point is that the new drawing ability gave MAD's writers a vehicle for more ambitious humor with far greater range."
95% of the funny in Mad came from the art or the artists. Which is all physical comedy: animation, pantomime, slapstick, deadpan, mugging, caricature, character turns, and all manner of silliness which has no proper name.
Not coincidentally, Harvey Kurtzman, Mad's progenitor (both versions of it) and greatest writer, would wildly act out the stories for his artists as he assigned them. As the only writer Mad ever had who could plot and had real comic timing, he was also the only Mad writer who deserved the stunning results his artists gave him.
Without the speedboat tug and buoyancy of the art, none of the cultural stuff would ever have gotten up on its skis. Five thousand satire magazines came and went during the 20th century. Satire without the redemption of great artistic performance is just carnival food. Every day there's 23 different new things to make fun of or spin negatively, if you're so inclined; barrel fish for the jackals to nibble.
Anonymous-- I was always taught that John Locke's famous comment about taking refuge with lions was part of his jostling with his great counterpart in social philosophy, Thomas Hobbes. Locke took less comfort than Hobbes in the idea that the great Leviathan state would protect us from life that, in a state of nature, was "nasty, brutish and short." He supposedly wondered what sort of man would trust his fate to a strong authoritarian government to avoid getting mugged.
Laurence John-- Drucker worked on several syndicated strips, first as an apprentice erasing pencil lines and later as a ghost artist and finally as the official artist, but nothing along the lines you want. He pitched half a dozen strips to syndicates (mostly corny 1950s shlock proposals). Al Capp made him a lucrative offer to ghost L'il Abner but Drucker turned him down. He came close with a proposed strip about Caroline Kennedy in the White House, but he didn't make a sale until his Benchley strip during the Reagan years. His DC war comics did not involve Hollywood celebrities, but then again they were war comics. No graphic novels.
David, thanks again, and that’s a shame. I would love to see more of the kind of work as in panels 2, 3 & 4. They offer a tantalising glimpse of a more everyday / family / domestic drama side of life set in the late '50s - mid '60s northeastern US, which Drucker inhabited, which is much more interesting to me than the film & TV parodies.
Re- Locke,
I see you beling to the pedant's camp.
Kev Ferrara-- I confess I read MAD the same way-- it was all about the pictures for me too. There were some issues where I scarcely read a word but still remember some of the pictures vividly. I always attributed that to my illiteracy.
As for Kurtzman-- well, he was certainly a force of nature. You have to admire anyone with the strength of personality to imprison Frazetta, Davis, Elder and Jaffee on an assembly line in a hotel suite to crank out Little Annie Fanny. They-- like Gaines and Hefner-- tolerated his totalitarian ways because they respected his talent, but eventually the trains had to run on time. As with Orson Welles, sometimes Kurtzman's creativity was self-defeating.
Anonymous-- Ah, I see you're one of those "nasty, brutish and short" fans.
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