No one else will remember or care about this, but a while back I recounted how I was once deluded into thinking MAD caricaturist Mort Drucker didn’t use pencils, but inked his pictures directly. Tonight I happened across my ancient copy of Mort Drucker’s MAD Show-Stoppers and noticed the included biographical essay (written by Nick Meglin), which includes the following passage, and must have been my original source:
Drucker doesn’t think out his ideas on paper. He doesn’t do thumbnail sketches. He prefers instead to envision the completed work in his mind beforehand. He later duplicates the concept on paper as best he can, allowing accidents and changes that may possible improve the work as he goes along. … “It’s also a sure way to keep from being influenced by your research,” reveals Drucker. “I put the figure in where I think it belongs and not where the photo dictates. Staging an illustration around available reference points limits your freedom to tell a story effectively; when an artist does that, he ignores his very purpose.”
It goes on to say that Drucker sometimes used pencils, but only for panel backgrounds.
Anyway, the latter part of that quote is reminiscent of some of Frank’s talk about photo-referencing, etc., which is interesting to me because Mort Drucker’s one of the last artists I would’ve associated with Frank’s ideas. He doesn’t often achieve the associated flow Frank talks about so much, I don’t think, but still… half-baked connections are what blogs are for.
UPDATE: An anonymous commenter has rightly pointed out conflicting evidence.
