Jack Davis put a funny face on the pop culture of the 20th century. A great caricaturist and comic-book artist in a great age of caricature and comic art, Davis, who died last week at age 91, was a charter member of Mad magazine and created covers for TV Guide and Time, record album jackets and movie posters. Perhaps most famously, his illustrations for It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World in 1963 were as packed with activity and characters as a Bosch or Bruegel.
Davis was not my favorite Mad magazine caricaturist. That was Mort Drucker, whose drawings struck me as more elegant and naturalistic. But Davis’ work was in my life more.
There were his posters for Mad World, The Russians Are Coming, The Bad News Bears, Bananas, even for Robert Altman’s The Long Goodbye, with Mad-style word balloons and jokes; album art for the Cowsills and Johnny Cash; and all those TV Guide covers, picturing the casts of Mission: Impossible, Laverne & Shirley, The Odd Couple, Laugh-In, Barney Miller and many more. He designed characters for the 1967 Rankin Bass stop-motion feature Mad Monster Party and for the The Jackson 5ive Saturday morning cartoon in the ’70s.