Jack Davis Obituary

EC Artist’s Passing Marks The End Of An Era

♦Tripwire’s Senior Editor ANDREW COLMAN commemorates the passing of EC legend Jack Davis…

The last of the great E.C. horror mavens, Jack Davis, passed away on 27 July. He was 91. Best known for his work on the Mad comic and later on in the 1960s and 1970s, Mad Magazine, Davis, as much as any other artist employed by Bill Gaines, was the soul of the publisher’s output. Compelled to draw from an early age, throughout his teens and early twenties Davis honed his skills on various campus and Navy publications, arriving in New York in 1949 as a freelancer at the exact point when Gaines began his overhaul of his father’s company into Entertaining Comics.

Despite having limited experience, Davis, who was on the verge of quitting the industry and returning to Georgia after many rejections, quickly became a mainstay of E.C., contributing to virtually every New Trend and New Direction title before the publisher succumbed to the vagaries of the comics code in the mid 1950s. Best known for his efforts in classic series such as Tales From The Crypt, Vault Of Horror, Two-Fisted Tales, Shock Suspenstories and of course Mad, Davis proved to be adaptable and versatile, his more formal, filmic work in the horror and war books offset by his cartoonish, ludicrously distorted art in Mad. Eventually his style loosened up on such horror tales as Foul Play, which were more reminiscent of his Mad efforts.

Continuing to work in humour magazines and comics after E.C., notably under the auspices of Mad creator Harvey Kurtzman, Davis eventually focused entirely on that genre, moving also into record covers, film posters and books from the 1960s onwards – his quirky, off-the-wall yet oddly classicist style in much demand from then on, including from key magazines such as Time and T.V. Guide. He returned to the Gaines fold in the mid-1960s as one of the “usual gang of idiots” of Mad Magazine, staying there for many years, once again collaborating with editor Al Feldstein, and later Nick Meglin.

In many respects Davis’s art for humour books from the Mad comic onwards defined cartooning in the 1950s, when his ersatz style was swiped by many imitators. Instantly recognizable throughout his considerable career, his work has been an influence on current artists such as Kyle Baker and Dave Taylor. Inducted into the Eisner Hall Of Fame in 2003, this very popular man clearly enjoyed his profession, never losing his zest for illustration. A line has been drawn over an era with his passing.

Here is a very small selection of a huge career that spanned decades

Jack Davis Obit www.tripwiremagazine.co.uk