NCS TO HONOR MORT DRUCKER

Poster art for NCS’s 2015 Reuben Awards weekend, May 22-24 in Washington, D.C., identifies guests and honorees (clockwise from top left): Mort Drucker (Mad) and Jeff Keane (Family Circus), as well as the weekend event’s newly announced speakers: Brian Crane (Pickles) and Nick Galifianakis; the Washington Post’s animating editoonist, Ann Telnaes; D.C.-based illustrator/author Juana Medina; Andertoons.com’s Mark Anderson; and comic-book artist Doug Mahnke.

NCS President Tom Richmond did the caricatures, as he has for several years lately, but this year, there’s a difference: Richmond inherited the legendary Drucker’s caricaturing gig at Mad, and now he’s rendering his take on a one-man institution. At Michael Cavna’s ComicRiffs, he was asked: What’s it like? Said Richmond: “Let’s see — I’m drawing a caricature of one of the greatest caricature artists in the history of illustration who is also a personal hero, a picture that is going to be mailed to the members of an organization made up of the greatest cartoonists in the world. Nope — no pressure.”

At the Reuben Awards Banquet, Drucker will receive the newest NCS award, the NCS Medal of Honor, created last fall to honor lifetime achievement by persons who aren’t eligible for the Society’s already extant lifetime achievement award, the Milton Caniff Award. Yes, that’s right: the NCS now has two lifetime achievement awards.

In 1987, Drucker won the NCS’s Reuben Award, which recognizes the “cartoonist of the year.” Until now, the group’s only lifetime achievement honor was the Milton Caniff Award, but in an odd quirk of the Society’s rules, a Reuben recipient cannot subsequently be awarded the Caniff honor. The Medal of Honor was created to enable the erstwhile verboten to be boten.

Oddly, it’s okay the other way around: a Caniff recipient can subsequently receive the Reuben, as Jack Davis did in 2000 (having received the Caniff Award in 1996).

Said Richmond in announcing the inaugural winner of the Medal of Honor: “Drucker was chosen as the first recipient by unanimous vote.”

Drucker, 85, began as a comic-book assistant shortly after World War II, and became an iconic staple of Mad, drawing decades of film and TV parodies when the magazine was at its pop-culture zenith in Boomer-generation popularity, reaching millions of readers.

Drucker is undeniably deserving of the lifetime achievement award, but I think he should have been given the Caniff Award, which, named after one of the founding members of the Society (who personally kept it functioning during some lean years), seems to me a more prestigious award than one made up expressly to circumvent a silly rule. If the NCS board could invent a new award, surely it could have just as easily revised the rules.

On the other hand, for Drucker, this makes the Medal of Honor an even more prestigious award: he is held in such esteem by his colleagues that they invented an award just for him.

Congratulations, Mort.