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Artist
Biography
Born Mort Drucker March 22, 1929 (age 88) Brooklyn, New York City Nationality American
Cartoonist, artist
Mort Drucker (born March 22, 1929) is an American caricaturist and comics artist best known as a contributor for over five decades in Mad, where he specialized in satires on the leading feature films and television series. Some sources list his birth date as March 22 and others as March 29.
In a 1985 Tonight Show appearance, when Johnny Carson asked Michael J. Fox, "When did you really know you'd made it in show business?", Fox replied, "When Mort Drucker drew my head."
Drucker attended Brooklyn's Erasmus Hall High School. There he met his future wife Barbara, whom he married shortly after her graduation.
The couple moved to Long Island, living in Woodbury, where they brought up two daughters, Laurie and Melanie; their family eventually expanded with three grandchildren.
Drucker entered the comics field by assisting Bert Whitman on the newspaper comic strip Debbie Dean in 1947 when he was 18, based on a recommendation from Will Eisner.
He then joined the staff of National Periodical Publications (DC Comics), where he worked as a retoucher.
While at DC, Drucker also ghosted "The Mountain Boys," Paul Webb's regular gag panel for Esquire Magazine.
Early in the 1950s, Drucker left his DC staff gig and began doing full-time freelance work for a number of comic book publishers such as Dell, Atlas and St. John's, as well as several humor and war titles for his former employer.
In the fall of 1956, shortly after the departure of Mad's founding editor Harvey Kurtzman, Drucker found his way to Mad.
His first visit to the magazine's offices coincided with a World Series broadcast, and publisher Bill Gaines told Drucker that if the Brooklyn Dodgers won the game, he would be given a drawing assignment.
The Dodgers did win. Capricious though Drucker's alleged audition process may have been, it made for a good anecdote. Years later, Gaines unsurprisingly confessed, "We would have hired him anyway."
By the time he wound down his Mad career 55 years later, Drucker held the longest uninterrupted tenure of any Mad artist. Drucker has the most bylined articles by any Mad artist who does not also write his own material, with more than 400.
