The Art of Jack Davis

“I work pretty loosely and if it’s something I really enjoy drawing, it goes pretty fast.  When it gets down to doing really tight work and the client is pretty picky, you can have it, because I don’t want it.” - Jack Davis

Jack Davis creates 8 rough sketches before one meets the approval from the agency art director who handled this ad campaign for Bell South Mobility.  Taken from the 1996 out-of-print book The Complete Book of Humorous Art.

Davis and Mort Drucker were always my favorite MAD Magazine artists by far.

Bio:
Jack Davis is a prolific American cartoonist and illustrator, known for his advertising art, magazine covers, film posters, record album art and numerous comic book stories. He was one of the founding cartoonists for Mad in 1952.

Born in 1924, Davis saw comic book publication at the age of 12 when he contributed a cartoon to the reader's page of Tip Top Comics #9 (December, 1936). He drew for his high school paper and then spent three years in the U.S. Navy, where he contributed to the daily Navy News. Attending the University of Georgia on the G.I. Bill, he did drawings for the campus newspaper and helped launch an off-campus humor publication, Bullsheet, which he described as "not political or anything but just something with risque jokes and cartoons." After graduation, he was a cartoonist intern at The Atlanta Journal, and he worked one summer inking Ed Dodd's Mark Trail comic strip, a strip which he later parodied in Mad as Mark Trade.

His style of wild, free-flowing brushwork and wacky characters made him a perfect choice when Harvey Kurtzman launched Mad as a zany, satirical EC comic book in 1952. Davis contributed to other Kurtzman magazines - Trump, Humbug and Help! - eventually expanding into illustrations for record jackets, movie posters, books and magazines, including Time and TV Guide. In 1961, he wrote, drew, and edited his own comic book, Yak Yak, for Dell Comics.

Davis was inducted into the Comic Book Hall of Fame in 2003. He also received the National Cartoonists Society Milton Caniff Lifetime Achievement Award in 1996. A finalist for inclusion in the Jack Kirby Hall of Fame in 1990, 1991 and 1992, he received the National Cartoonists Society's Advertising Award for 1980 and their Reuben Award for 2000.
In June 2002, Davis had a retrospective exhibition of his work at the Society of Illustrators in New York. He was inducted into the Society of Illustrators Hall of Fame in 2005.