Mort Drucker, Master of the Mad Caricature, Is Dead at 91

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"Mr. Drucker’s facility was best expressed in multi-caricature crowd scenes. His parody of the 1986 Woody Allen film, “Hannah and Her Sisters,” opened with a panel depicting a Thanksgiving dinner that, in addition to most of the movie’s ensemble cast, included caricatures of Mr. Allen’s first wife, Louise Lasser; the film critics Roger Ebert and Gene Siskel; Mayor Ed Koch of New York; and Mad’s mascot, Alfred E. Neuman. His drawing for a 1970 Time magazine cover, “Battle for the Senate,” now in the National Portrait Gallery, featured a pileup of 15 individually characterized political figures, including President Richard M. Nixon and Vice President Spiro T. Agnew. Mad’s takeoff on the MGM retrospective feature “That’s Entertainment,” published in 1975, required Mr. Drucker to caricature more than two dozen stars.

“I think I’ve drawn almost everyone in Hollywood,” he told The New York Times in 2000.

Mr. Drucker not only satirized popular culture; he also became a part of it. Appearing on “The Tonight Show” in 1985, the actor Michael J. Fox told Johnny Carson that he knew he had made it in show business “when Mort Drucker drew my head.” The director Joe Dante wrote that “there are few thrills in life quite like seeing your own movie parodied in the pages of Mad.”

But not everyone was so pleased. According to Mr. Hendrix, Mad’s 1981 parody of “The Empire Strikes Back,” “The Empire Strikes Out,” prompted the Lucasfilm legal department to send a cease-and-desist letter demanding that the issue be recalled. “Mad replied by sending a copy of another letter they had received the previous month — from George Lucas, offering to buy the original artwork for the ‘Empire’ parody and comparing Mort Drucker to Leonardo da Vinci.”

READ THE OBIT BY J HOBERMAN