Saturday 20 October 2012

Recommended: Mort Drucker

MAD's Greatest Artists: Mort Drucker
(Running Press, 2012)
DAVE SIM:
(from 'Dave Sim On Parody & Copyright', Following Cerebus #3, February 2005)
I remember the first few times having lunch with Seth, Chester Brown, and Joe Matt, and trying to find common areas of interest. I'd always think they were kidding when they would all be enthusing about some cartoonist I just don't rate very highly, like John Stanley or Harold Gray, and then I'd bring up something like Sienkiewicz's Stray Toasters and they'd think I was the one who was kidding. One time I mentioned Mort Drucker, and that was very strange, because we all ranked Mort Drucker very highly. I think he's still the only cartoonist in that category. We all remembered the first Star Trek parody that he did. I reread it a while ago, and it still holds up very well.
Original Art for Star Blecch (MAD #115, 1967) by Mort Drucker
(Sadly not included in 'MAD's Greatest Artists: Mort Drucker')

2 comments:

Max Southall said...

Back in Kitchener in the sixties, in addition to various DC and Marvel comics titles, William Gaines' EC-inspired MAD was the only non comics-code "comic" that the hard corps collectors were into - Manny, John, Dave, Steve, Harry and some others. (Yes THAT Dave.)
MAD had a great Mort Drucker parody of the Batman TV show - though that amounts to a parody of a parody - just a bit earlier than his Star Trek satire, also great. We still have in the CerebusTV Archive the original "TV Guide" issue featuring Adam West and Burt Ward - along with the copy of MAD with the Drucker Batman story.

Max Southall said...

What's more, in the CerebusTV Archives is also a period audio parody of Star Trek called "Star Truck - Garbage Scow of the Spaaceways" on compact cassette that we participated in back then...