Art Gates is in my new book on Mad imitators Behaving Madly with quite a spectacular parody of the movie Blackboard Jungle with Glen Ford. It was done in the style of Harvey Kurtzman's Mad magazine parodies and it's very well drawn. At the same time cartoonist Gates was drawing romance comics in a much more realistic style, based on John Prentice's version of Alex Raymond's Rip Kirby. And he was not far away from selling a daily newspaper cartoon about his time in the army. And he had just done a four issue series of Hillbilly comics for Charlton in a style that could be called similar to Mort Drucker's movie parody style, altough Drucker hadn't invented that style yet at that point. All of these things I have shown here before and you can find them by following the link. Tat will also lead you to a series of cartoon style 'sponsored' newspaper strips featuring a Milkman. Recently I came across a longer run of these ad gags, so here they are.
Regarding Drucker's style: If one didn't see his prior work, his Mad style, at least in the early days, was pretty unique. Except the Mad rendering was hardly different from what he had been doing in (at least) his war books at DC. Which in turn would look like something of a forerunner for Neal Adams' style.
ReplyDeleteSpeaking of the DC war books, then edited by Bob Kanigher: To his credit, Kanigher relied a lot on artists doing the full job -- and with individual styles while Julie (B.O.) Schwartz kept the early 50s Toth/Barry house style going.
Anyway: What looked so radical in Drucker's work at Mad is mutely what he had already been doing.
As far as the ining goes, I agree with you. But his style of cartooning was a unique invention for Mad, in y opinion. I even feel that he didn't really get it until a couple years later, whe he started using influences from Walace Wood and Ronald Searle. Some people say he took everything from Jack Davis, but arpart for one of the covers he did for Harvey Kurtzman's mad, I don't think he really did a lot of cartooning until after Drucker popularized it. Bot were very suited to it, of course.
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