Veteran artist best known for his caricatures in Mad
Mort Drucker, a longtime contributor to Mad magazine known for his caricatures of actors, politicians and other celebrities, died Wednesday at his home in Woodbury, New York. He was 91.
His longtime friend, John Reiner, confirmed the death.
Drucker, who specialized in illustrating Mad’s movie and television satires, inspired several generations of cartoonists. “To me, he’s the guy,” caricaturist Drew Friedman said. “I used to imitate his work in Mad when I was a kid. I wanted to be Mort Drucker; I even loved his name.”
Drucker’s facility was best expressed in multi-caricature crowd scenes. His parody of the 1986 Woody Allen film, “Hannah and Her Sisters,” opened with a panel depicting a Thanksgiving dinner that, in addition to most of the movie’s ensemble cast, included caricatures of Allen’s first wife, Louise Lasser; film critics Roger Ebert and Gene Siskel; Mayor Ed Koch of New York; and Mad’s mascot, Alfred E. Neuman.
His drawing for a 1970 Time magazine cover, “Battle for the Senate,” now in the National Portrait Gallery, featured a pileup of 15 individually characterized political figures, including President Richard Nixon and Vice President Spiro Agnew.
Mad’s takeoff on the MGM retrospective feature “That’s Entertainment,” published in 1975, required Drucker to caricature more than two dozen stars.
“I think I’ve drawn almost everyone in Hollywood,” he told The NewYork Times in 2000.
Some of Drucker’s most inventive works were double satires. The 1963 Mad piece “East Side Story” is a parody of “West Side Story” as played out by prominent international figures. Nikita Khrushchev, Fidel Castro and Charles de Gaulle are among the many world leaders drawn cavorting against photographed backdrops of New York City streets. “It’s a Blunderful Life,” published in 1996, updated “It’s a Wonderful Life” to star Nixon as Bill Clinton’s guardian angel.
A self-taught freelance cartoonist who had worked on war, western, science fiction and romance comic books as well as personality-driven titles like The Adventures of Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis and The Adventures of Bob Hope, Drucker came to Mad in late 1956, soon after Al Feldstein succeeded Harvey Kurtzman, the magazine’s founder, as editor. Mad had run only occasional TV and movie satires, but Drucker’s arrival “changed everything,” pop-culture critic Grady Hendrix wrote in a 2013 Film Comment appreciation of Mad’s movie parodies.
“No one saw Drucker’s talent,” Hendrix wrote, until he illustrated “The Night That Perry Masonmint Lost a Case,” a takeoff on the television courtroom drama “Perry Mason,” in 1959. It was then, Hendrix maintained, that “the basic movie parody format for the next 44 years was born.”
From the early 1960s on, nearly every issue of Mad included a movie parody, and before Drucker retired he had illustrated 238, more than half of them. The last one, “The Chronic-Ills of Yawnia: Prince Thespian,” appeared in 2008.
Drucker compared his method to creating a movie storyboard: “I become the ‘camera,’ ” he once said, “and look for angles, lighting, close-ups, wide angles, long shots — just as a director does to tell the story in the most visually interesting way he can.”
Hendrix called Drucker “the cartoonist’s equivalent of an actor’s director” and “a master of drawing hands, faces and body language.” Friedman praised Drucker’s restraint: “He wasn’t really hung up on exaggerating. He was far more subtle and nuanced — interested in how people stood and so on.”
Drucker was modest about his gifts. “When I started working for Mad, they assigned me TV satires and asked me to draw famous people,” he recalled. ”It took me a long time to learn the skills I have, and it was time-consuming. With me, everything is trial and error.”
Morris Drucker was born on March 22, 1929, in Brooklyn. His father, Edward, was a businessman who repaired jukeboxes and ran a bar, among other things. His mother, Sarah (Spielvogel) Drucker, was a homemaker. He attended Erasmus Hall High School, where he met his future wife, Barbara Hellerman.
His survivors include his wife; two daughters, Laurie Bachner and Melanie Amsterdam; and three grandchildren.