Drucker Ink

Sunday More Of What I Showed Before Day.

Last week Mad giant Mort Drucker passed away. I celebrated his career by sharing one of his rarest and least know comic series: the two gag series he did for the Air Force newspaper AAFF. There is another series he did in the late fifties. In 1956 Mort Drucker got what every crtoonist of his generation wanted: his own daily panel. He was taopped to do a daily cartoon series based on the hillbilly characters created by cartoonist Paul Webb in the forties for Esquire , which were a huge hit and generated a lot of merchandise. Drucker based his characters on Webb's design and Webb was credited instead of Drucker himself. Mort Drucker was not interviewed a lot about his career outside of Mad (the downside of being one of Mad's Maddest Artists), but I believe I have read somehwere that he was asked by the older cartoonist himself. The cartoons themselves (and all new characters) were typical Mort Drucker - or at least in the style he still used in all his work not involving caricatures.

But the panel was not a succes. It was not widely distributed, And indeed, the syndicate doing that, Columbia Features, was not one of the major players in the field. Other notable failures they launched were the Bat Masterson strip by Howard Nostrand (and Bob Powell), Nero Wolfe by Mike Roy and a slew of ghost artists, Davey Crockett, Frontiersman by Jim McArdle (where Jack Kirby ghosted three Sundays) and Rip Tide by Jerry Grandenetti (I am going to look for that one). Still, Mort Drucker slogged on for more than two and a half years. The last daily gag appeared on December 12 1959. I have found two sources for this panel strip, although the only one that has the earliest months seems to have regularely skipped the Saturday panel, leaving me one short.

Here are the first six weeks, missing those saturdays.

The Other Mort

Sunday Dedication Day.

Last week Mort Drucker passed away at age 91. Like the rest of the world I was a fan of his work. Almost too familiar with it, as a lifelong fan of Mad, who discovered the magazine with his cover of Murder on the Orient Express. SO I have always been on th elook-out for his lesser know and earlier work. One of the drawbacks of being one of "Mad's Maddest Artists" was that you only got publicity as on eof "Mad's Maddest Artist", although Drucker did somewhat break out of that with his Time covers. But he started working in the late forties (as an assistant to Maurice Whitman's Debbie Dean), got into the art department of DC (where he corrected art where needed and did a lot of filler pages) and started freelancing for Marvel and DC. I showed material from each of these over the years. There is even an interview with Drucker online where they use my scan of a letter non Drucker, non Whitman revival of Debbie Dean in the short running Arrow tabloid of the fifties as a sample of his Debbie Dean assisting (I guess the editor liked the fact it was in color). I even shared a couple of samples of the period when Drucker took over the weekly cartoon of Paul Webb's Mountain Men in th elate fifties. But I also have a rare set of scans of a completely unknown )or never mentioned by those who do know it) series of gag strips he did for Bradburys American Air Force Features. Followers of this blog will know I have been showing rarities from this paper over the last half year. It was assembled by someone at the Bradbury company (my guess is Herbert Rogoff) and features short gag strips and some real fact realistic stuff by various artists, incluidng a couple of big names. It was offered (or probably sold) to air Force newspapers, who used it as a Sunday newspaper bonus. Starting in 1955, it went on deep into the sixties, although judging by the quality of the contributions, the budget must have dropped along the way.

And Mort Drucker was one of them. He was know to work fast and easy in the stories he did for Timely/Atlas (the later Marvel) and DC, but here he really seems to have whipped them out. What we are left with is his incredible style and facillity with a brush.

I found an online source for six of the years this paper ran. Click the link for more from that (and stand by for even bigger releases).

Old Drucker

Saturday Leftover Day.

Yesterday I shared a couple of stories by Bob Oksner from DC's Pat Boone comic #2. Because it was a DC comic, this book also had a couple of fillers, done by none other than Mort Drucker. Drucker often worked alongside Oksner in the same books (and ofte in a similar style as well), before becoming the big movie man at Mad. It's always fun to see his lesser known work. There is also one page by another DC regular filler artist, Henri Boltinoff.